Archive of Our Own ^beta

By the time he was nine years old, there were two things that Gong Jun knew were absolutely, without a doubt, one hundred percent true.

The first was that wishes were dangerous things. Anything could happen if you sent a wish out into the world.

When Gong Jun was seven years old, he turned Liu Yichen’s bicycle tires into flowers.

He didn’t mean to do it. It had just happened. Yichen had spent the whole day telling their class how his grandfather had bought him a new bicycle. It was bright blue with white handlebars and a basket Yichen could put his schoolbag in, and had a shiny cheerful-sounding bell that Gong Jun had already spent a whole Sunday listening to while Yichen zipped around the neighbourhood.

Worst of all was the reason Yichen had a new bicycle in the first place. On a Friday after school, Yichen had carefully planted a row of sunflower seeds nestled close to the side of his house in a bright sunny spot, and asked them to grow as quickly and strongly as they could. On Saturday, the entire family woke up to find the sunflowers had shot all the way up to Yichen’s bedroom on the second floor, where they waved gently in the breeze. Yichen’s grandfather was so pleased that he sent someone to town immediately to buy the bicycle as a reward.

If you asked Gong Jun, there was no point in having sunflowers nearly as tall as a house. The flowers were so large that their seeds were impossible to eat and they blocked all the sunlight to Yichen’s room. There was no reason for anyone to get a whole new bicycle for it, especially not one with a basket and a bell, and there was definitely no reason for Yichen to tell Gong Jun, very earnestly, that he would grow into his magic soon too, as if Yichen knew anything about it at all.

After school, Yichen dragged everyone over to his house so they could take turns riding his bicycle and admiring his sunflowers. Gong Jun only followed along because he lived two houses away from Yichen and always walked home with him and had no choice. When Yichen started riding his bike up and down the street so he could show everyone how the paint sparkled and the bell rang out clearly, Gong Jun looked up at the sunflowers in front of Yichen’s house and thought if Yichen was so very clever, he could have just made himself a bicycle, instead of growing a bunch of flowers that didn’t do anything for anyone. A bicycle with two giant sunflowers for wheels, since Yichen liked them so much.

The next moment, Gong Jun heard a shout of alarm and a dull thump. He whirled around and saw Yichen sprawled on the ground. Next to him was his bicycle, but instead of wheels, there were two large sunflowers fitted at each end.

His grandfather rushed out of the house and stopped short, staring at the bicycle in astonishment. Gong Jun couldn’t blame him. Even Yichen was so surprised that it hadn’t occurred to him to cry about the bruises from his fall.

No one could figure out what happened to the bike. Gong Jun knew, of course, that it couldn’t really be his fault. His magic hadn’t shown up yet, after all, and even if it had, magic couldn’t turn bicycle wheels into sunflowers, but he was still so uneasy about it that he went to class early the next day and left a banana milk on Yichen’s desk as an apology.

The next time one of Gong Jun’s wishes came true was six months later, when he forgot to study for a math test. Gong Jun hated math. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t understand the point of learning how many pieces of pie Yutong would have if she cut two pies into six pieces and gave one quarter of them to Yiren. If it was up to Gong Jun, he’d just give Yiren one of the pies and keep the other one for himself and cut it into as many pieces as he wanted.

He walked to school the day of the math test wishing fervently that he didn’t have to write the test after all. He didn’t care how it happened, the test papers could grow legs and run away for all he cared, as long as somehow the test would go away. He sat in class all morning, dreading the moment when his teacher would tell them to put away their books and hand out the test papers. But after lunch, by which time he’d already concocted a story to explain to his parents the undoubtedly poor grade he would receive, his teacher explained that the test was cancelled. She had looked through every cupboard and every drawer in her desk, but the papers were gone.

Gong Jun sat in class anxiously for the rest of the day, sure that someone would realize it had been all his fault. Last time, he had thought the bicycle wheels couldn’t have changed because of him, but two wishes were too much of a coincidence. No one else in his class disliked math as much as he did, and he had wanted so very badly to not write the test.

When no one said anything to him, he walked home anxiously and did his homework anxiously and sat at dinner anxiously and finally when his father asked him what had happened at school that day, he burst into tears. In between sobs, he confessed what he’d done.

His mother gathered him into her lap. “That’s not how magic works, Junjun,” she said, petting his hair. “Paper doesn’t want to disappear. You could make it remember what kind of tree it was, maybe, and make it sprout, but you can’t just make it stop existing.”

Gong Jun knew she was right, but he couldn’t get rid of the horrible feeling that it was his fault.

“It could be the gift of prophecy,” his father suggested. There was an air of excitement in the room then. All the grownups started talking over each other and waving their hands. Gong Jun ignored them all and kept quietly crying on his mother’s lap.

Finally, his uncle came to crouch down in front of him. “Jun’er, do you think you can tell me exactly what you thought about the test?”

Gong Jun wiped his face and explained, in between hiccups, that he had forgotten about the test and wished extra hard that he wouldn’t have to write it.

“Are you sure you were thinking that you didn’t want to write the test? Are you sure it wasn’t that you suddenly realized you wouldn’t have to write the test?”

Gong Jun was bewildered. If he had only realized the test would disappear, instead of wanting it to disappear, then why would it be his fault? No matter how many times his uncle asked, Gong Jun didn’t budge. He knew very well that he had made a wish, just like the time before with Yichen’s bicycle.

“Ah well, never mind then.” His uncle stood up straight and ruffled his hair. “Don’t worry, Jun’er, you didn’t make anything happen. It was just a coincidence.”

Gong Jun wasn’t convinced, but he went to bed with a slightly lighter heart. In all the upset, no one had remembered to scold him for not studying.

After that, he tried out smaller wishes sometimes, just to see what would happen. Strawberry milk instead of banana milk at lunch, that no one would be able to find him during hide-and-seek, that he’d make it to the convenience store before the last chocolate bar sold out. As long as it was something he really wanted, the wish always came true.

The last time Gong Jun made a wish was one year later. Once every six months, Gong Jun’s father took him to a horrible place where a man with strange glasses and a too-wide smile poked around Gong Jun’s mouth and looked at his teeth. If Gong Jun was really unlucky, the man told him he had a cavity, and then he did something strange with funny tools that made Gong Jun’s teeth hurt.

On the appointed day, Gong Jun spent the morning sitting glumly in the vegetable garden on a large overturned flowerpot, contemplating his fate. One of his teeth twinged a little every time he ate something, so he was sure the man was going to make everything worse. When the hours ticked over into the afternoon, he heard his father’s voice call out to him. Gong Jun stayed where he was and dragged the toe of his shoe through the dirt in figure eights.

His father turned the corner of the house and spotted him. “There you are,” he said. “Come on, we have to leave soon.”

Gong Jun let himself be ushered out of the garden and into the car. The trees whooshed by them far too quickly as they drove down the street. He wished something, anything would happen to make it so he couldn’t go after all. As they were stopped at a traffic light, he imagined how nice it would be if the car just stopped working, right here in the middle of the street. They’d have to go home then, and Gong Jun was sure the man with the funny tools wouldn’t come find him there.

The light turned green but their car stood still.

Later, when Gong Jun remembered this moment, he always remembered the moment of euphoria first. For one shining moment, all he could think of was his lucky escape.

Then a car hit them from the back. Their car spun forward into the intersection. Gong Jun was still trying to understand what had happened when another car rammed them in the side.

Gong Jun saw shattered glass spread across the seat next to him. His father was slumped forward in his seat. Gong Jun closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw the bright lights of the hospital and his mother’s anxious face over him.

Somehow, miraculously, he was unhurt except for a few cuts and bruises, but his father had broken his leg and one arm, and had to wear a brace around his neck for a month.

Gong Jun waited for someone to ask him about it. Surely someone would realize that this time it had definitely been his fault. He waited while his father was in the hospital, and he waited after he got out and started hobbling around on crutches, but no one asked him anything at all. The next time Gong Jun found himself wishing for something, he stopped.

He didn’t think he could hurt anyone by wishing for a new set of coloured pencils, but when he closed his eyes he saw his father again, asleep on his hospital bed and covered in bandages.

The second thing Gong Jun knew for absolute certain was that he had hardly any magic at all.

It wasn’t that he didn’t try. He did. When his mother showed him how to give seedlings a spark so they would shoot up overnight, or when his older cousins showed him how to wrap himself in wind currents until he could levitate, Gong Jun tried to do exactly what he was told.

“You have to listen, Jun’er,” his grandfather explained to him, when he tried to show him how to form a waterspout in his bathwater. “Listen to the water first and then tell it what you want it to do.” Gong Jun had a feeling that maybe he and the water didn’t speak the same language, because he couldn’t hear anything, no matter how much he listened, and the water certainly didn’t seem able to hear him.

It might not have mattered very much if Gong Jun had been from just any family. Lots of people didn’t have magic, after all, and they lived perfectly happy lives. But those people generally didn’t have a father who could make wood remember what it was like to be a tree with a single touch, or a mother whose skill with herbs was so famous that even other witches lined up to buy her spells.

At first, Gong Jun didn’t mind very much. His concerns as a four-year-old revolved more around his toy trucks and the lives of his stuffed animals. There was still time, his mother always assured him. Some people seemed like they didn’t have any magic until one day they did.

He minded a little more when he began school and his friends started making their pencils sprout leaves and the letters on the blackboard zoom around until the teachers scolded them. He minded a lot when Yichen, who had been his last friend to be as magic-less as he was, made his sunflowers grow as tall as his house.

His parents never said anything to him, but Gong Jun could feel the edge of worry that started to permeate every room. Once, he heard them talking late at night when he was supposed to be asleep.

“If he doesn’t—” His mother sounded tired.

“There’s other things he can do.”

“I know, but he can’t take over the shop if he—”

“Jun’er works hard.” That was his grandfather. “You see how he tries. He’ll be perfectly fine.”

Gong Jun did try hard, and when trying hard wasn’t enough, he found other things to do while he waited for any sign of his magic to show up. He spent long afternoons listening while his grandfather told him about every kind of magic there was. He learned that while his family’s shop focused on selling spells and charms made with plants, other shops worked with wind and fire. That there were witches who focused on cleaning spells and ones who could look into pools of water to see what was happening far away. He learned that Yichen’s family had the best spells for warding off a cold, but they couldn’t beat his own mother’s recipe for fever-reducing tea.

When he was seven, he learned the names of every plant in his family’s greenhouse and exactly what kind of soil and how much light they needed to grow. He learned what kind of trees meant good luck and which were best to protect against fire. When he was eight, he brought a little pot of ivy his mother gave him to his room and learned how to prune it when its trailing fronds grew too long. He learned how much water to give it and when it needed to be repotted. He talked to it while he worked, just in case. Maybe one day he’d learn how to hear what it was saying, the way his grandfather had explained.

After he turned nine, and any hopes anyone had of a magical future for him finally faded, he learned that there were things he could do even without magic. All the time he had spent in the greenhouse could be put to good use. He didn’t need magic to water or prune or learn to spot the signs of disease, although he couldn’t burn away leaf mold with a touch of his fingers like his mother.

When he was fourteen and old enough to help in the shop, he learned he didn’t need magic to wrap parcels or mind the till, although he did reluctantly have to accept the value of math to make change. He learned, as well, that the way a shop sold things mattered just as much as what it sold, and he learned that he had a knack for figuring out exactly what the right way was.

By the time he was twenty-three, Gong Jun had taken over the business side of his parents’ shop completely. By the time he was twenty-five, some of his uncles and aunts had asked him to manage their shops too.

Which is why, when he was twenty-seven and his mother decided to go to Shanghai for the Annual Conference of Witches, Sorcerers, and other Miscellaneous Magic-Wielders, Gong Jun went too, to help run her booth.

Gong Jun pulled a few more stay-warm charms from the box by his feet and tucked them into the basket on the table. “We need more of these.” He looked to the side where Qiaoqiao was sitting next to him. “If only someone would go to the car and get another box.”

“I don’t work here,” Qiaoqiao said promptly. “I work over there.” She pointed one perfectly manicured finger to the booth on the opposite side of the aisle.

Professor Li’s booth was considerably more drab than Gong Jun’s mother’s, but there was still a steady stream of visitors stopping by her table. Gong Jun wasn’t sure what exactly they were looking at, although perhaps neither did they. An attempt had clearly been made to organize things neatly, but the spells and charm pouches seemed to have ignored that in favour of spilling all over the table and sneaking into each other's baskets.

“Go work there, then.”

“I’m on break so I can spend time with my beloved family.” Qiaoqiao had so far spent the entirety of her break scrolling through her phone. “You go.”

“I have to stay so my handsome face attracts more customers.”

Qiaoqiao rolled her eyes. Before she could answer, a box landed with a thump on the table.

“Guess who’s here?”

“Ma, you didn’t have to. I would have gotten it.” Gong Jun pulled the box over to him and started to sort the charms into baskets.

His mother flapped her hand dismissively. “I wanted an excuse to see what everyone else brought. Anyway, guess who’s here.”

Gong Jun heard the sound of excited chatter from the end of their aisle. He looked up and saw three men turn the corner and start walking in their direction. The one in front was looking around him with the air of a kindly grandfather taking an interest in the antics of the children. The man next to him was beaming at everyone, like it was a special treat for him to meet them. Gong Jun watched as he winked at a witch selling enchanted mirrors. And there, behind the two of them, was Yichen, wearing a sweater in the ugliest shade of green Gong Jun had ever seen. He wiggled his eyebrows at Gong Jun when he saw him looking.

“Oh no,” Gong Jun heard Qiaoqiao whisper. She shot out of her seat, but it was too late. Before she could take more than a step, the Lius had arrived at Professor Li’s booth. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“What?” he whispered to her.

Qiaoqiao grabbed his mother’s arm. “Gugu, you have to do something. She’s going to start yelling at them.”

“Oh?” Gong Jun saw his mother’s eyes light up.

“Ma, don’t.”

“Don’t what?” She wiped her hands on her apron and took it off, shoving it into his arms. “I’m just saying hi to an old friend.”

Gong Jun watched with trepidation as his mother crossed the aisle. Professor Li’s face had turned the delicate shade of a just barely ripe strawberry and her hand was gripping the edge of the table like a vise.

Yichen’s father was picking up each charm one by one and giving them his kindly grandfather look. “And what’s this?” he asked, holding up a blue cotton pouch.

“For luck in new business endeavours,” Professor Li said. Her lips were pressed tightly together in a thin line.

“Ah,” Yichen’s father said, putting the charm back down. “Is luck in business a specialty of yours?”

Professor Li’s face turned redder than before. “How dare you? You—”

“Hello, Liu Chao,” Gong Jun’s mother said with a smile that would have seemed friendly to anyone who didn’t know her. “How kind of you to grace us with your presence.”

Gong Jun sank down into his seat. The room had fallen quiet around them. He could see people at nearby booths straining to hear what was happening while they pretended to shop.

“Why does she look so mad?” Qiaoqiao whispered to him. She had sunk into her chair too, trying to look as small as possible.

“She hates the Lius,” Gong Jun whispered back. That wasn’t quite accurate. His mother had no problem with Yichen, for example, who was standing behind his uncle, trying to be invisible, although he wasn’t likely to succeed with that sweater. She probably didn’t have much of a problem with Yichen’s uncle either. He was still vaguely beaming at everyone, probably the only person within five metres who seemed completely unaware of the tension in the air. No, his mother’s hatred was reserved specifically for Yichen’s father, Liu Chao.

“Why? What did they do?” Qiaoqiao had sat up a little. She looked more like she was about to watch a pro tennis match now, or a nature documentary about two rival tigers.

It wasn’t exactly what Liu Chao had done that was the problem, or so Gong Jun could gather. It was more that his mother didn’t think he should have been capable of doing anything at all. “He has less talent in his entire body than some people have in their thumbs,” his mother had said once.

“She thinks he’s up to something.”

Qiaoqiao looked even more interested now. “How long has he been up to something?”

Gong Jun shrugged. “Ever since he took over from his dad? You were seven, I think. The same year as the earthquake.” Gong Jun had been only twelve, but even he remembered feeling surprised. It had seemed like Yichen’s grandfather would always be there behind the front counter of his store, until one day he wasn’t.

At first things hadn’t changed very much. Even without Yichen’s grandfather there, the Lius carried on just the same. Then, in little hops and skips, so slowly no one realized, they started to do better and better, until one little shop in Chengdu wasn’t enough. They had stores in five different cities now.

Across the aisle, Professor Li took a deep breath. “You tell me what it is you did,” she said. Her hands were still clutching the table.

“What I did?” Yichen’s father raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know I’d done anything. Unless you mean me lawfully opening a store and minding my own business.”

“Conveniently down the street from me.”

“Is that a crime?”

“My sales are down twenty percent since you opened.”

“Is that true?” Gong Jun whispered to Qiaoqiao.

She shrugged. “I’ve never looked at the records but it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

“My dear.” Yichen’s father took his glasses off and pulled out a handkerchief to clean them. “If you simply can’t compete…” his voice trailed off.

“Compete? With you? I’m the first person who managed to figure out how to target luck.”

Yichen’s father shrugged. “With age…sometimes people start falling behind…getting set in their ways…failing to innovate.”

“Failing to innovate? Half your stock is poor copies of my spells.”

“They can’t be very poor if people prefer them to yours.” Yichen’s father smiled at her kindly. “After all, you’re so very talented,” he added, which only made Professor Li press her mouth into an even thinner line. Gong Jun’s mother was watching them both, her eyes darting back and forth.

Professor Li leaned forward ever so slightly. “That isn’t all you did,” she said in a voice so quiet that Gong Jun found himself leaning forward too in an attempt to listen.

“Hmm? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Even Yichen was wincing at the nonchalant tone in his father’s voice.

“What did he do?” Gong Jun asked Qiaoqiao in a whisper.

She was looking at them and frowning. “I don’t know. She’s never mentioned anything to me before.”

“I bet people are just coming to us because it’s something new,” Yichen piped up, breaking the tense atmosphere. “Maybe your shop just needs a little facelift.” He glanced to the side and smiled at Gong Jun in a way that had only ever spelled trouble for him. “Gong Jun is the reason your family’s stores all look so good, right, A-yi?” he asked Gong Jun’s mother. “What if he takes a look?”

Gong Jun looked at him suspiciously. Yichen winked at him. “Everyone knows you’re the best person for luck,” Yichen added to Professor Li, throwing another dangerously charming smile at her.

She looked slightly mollified. Somehow no one’s general distrust of the Lius ever managed to extend to Yichen.

Gong Jun’s mother looked back and forth between Gong Jun, Professor Li, and the Lius. Gong Jun could see the gears turning alarmingly fast in her head. “Ma,” he called, in a way he hoped managed to convey ‘please don’t’ and ‘I’m supposed to be on vacation after this’ and ‘I can’t do anything about your not-friend’s sales.’

“What a good idea,” she said slowly. “Let our Junjun fix things up for you, and you take a break for a while. When was the last time you had a holiday? You must be exhausted.” Gong Jun felt his own vacation slip further away from him.

“I’m supposed to be on vacation starting tomorrow.”

“So it works out perfectly.” His mother beamed.

Gong Jun was supposed to go to Sanya. He had booked the hotel six months ago.

“I look forward to seeing the results.” Yichen’s father inclined his head, still with that kindly smile, and swept away down the aisle. Yichen looked at Gong Jun and winked again before he followed his father and uncle.

Gong Jun’s mother was holding a murmured conversation with Professor Li. No doubt planning exactly what Gong Jun was going to be doing on his former vacation.

“Are you going to try and get out of it?” Qiaoqiao looked like she wanted the answer to be ‘definitely not.’

Professor Li was shooting hopeful little smiles at him while his mother talked to her. Gong Jun sighed. “No.” Maybe he could get a refund for the hotel.

“Oh, good. She really does need a vacation, you know.” Qiaoqiao was still watching Professor Li. “I thought having no classes to teach would mean she’d be less intense, but she’s been weird ever since the Lius opened their new shop up the street.”

Gong Jun glanced at Professor Li again. Now that he really looked, he could see the air of frazzled unkemptness about her. One of the buttons at her cuff was hanging loose and there was a stain near the hem of her shirt.

Qiaoqiao nudged him. “This means you get to work with me.”

“More like you’ll be working for me.” The thought of bossing Qiaoqiao around cheered Gong Jun up a little. “I’m going to take some of these empty boxes back to the car,” he said, grabbing the broken-down cardboard boxes stacked underneath the table. By the time he came back, maybe the details of his imminent fate would be ironed out for him.

There were enough stares and whispers as he walked through the conference center to make it clear that word had already spread. Gong Jun ignored them. It was to be expected when you got involved with the Lius.

The parking lot, at least, was relatively free of people. Gong Jun opened the car trunk and laid the cardboard across the bottom. There were still a few hours left of the conference. He could grab some more boxes now and save himself the trouble later if they started selling out of anything.

“Psst.” Gong Jun looked around. “Here!” He looked down. There was a hand waving at him from beside the car’s rear wheel. It was attached to an arm wearing a hideously green sweater.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhhh! Someone might hear you!”

Gong Jun sighed and crouched down on the ground. Yichen was wedged in the space between Gong Jun’s car and the next, hiding presumably. “If you didn’t want anyone to see you, why did you wear that sweater?”

“This?” Yichen petted the sleeve of his sweater. “What’s wrong with it? I wore it for luck.”

Gong Jun decided not to ask what exactly about the sweater was supposed to be lucky. “What do you want?”

“Maybe I just wanted to have a chat with you! Catch up with an old friend I miss!” Yichen had moved to Shanghai five years ago and only came home during the holidays. This was an ideal situation as far as Gong Jun was concerned.

“You’re crouched behind my car.”

“It’s cozy.”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay, look, I just need a small, simple favour.”

“No.”

“I haven’t even said what it is yet!”

“Okay, you can explain first and then I can say no.” None of Yichen’s favours had ever been simple. Once, in high school, he had asked Gong Jun to give a girl in his class a note. Gong Jun had handed it to her during lunch and she’d promptly burst into tears.

“I couldn’t reject her in person,” Yichen had explained when Gong Jun cornered him after school. “That would have been cruel!” Gong Jun had no reason to think Yichen’s standards for reasonable favours had changed since then.

“It’s really simple this time!” Yichen insisted. “I just need someone to cat-sit for me and look after my house.”

Gong Jun looked at him suspiciously. “What’s the catch? Is the cat going to leave mice on my pillow every morning?”

“She wouldn’t do that!” Yichen looked like someone had insulted his child. “She’s very good!”

“It’s the house, then. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing! It’s a very nice house, I just renovated it and everything!” Yichen took a deep breath. “It’s just, I don’t know exactly how long I’ll be gone for, but I thought, I mean, you’ll need a place to stay anyway, right? If you’re going to be in Shanghai to work on Professor Li’s shop?”

Gong Jun would need a place to stay, and a place he could stay for a while, probably. It had taken him three months to fix up his uncle’s shop properly, and he had no idea what was in store for him at Professor Li’s. Where he would be working. Because Yichen had suggested it.

“Did you do this on purpose?”

Yichen laughed nervously. “Haha, do what?”

“Yichen.”

“Okay, look, whatever happened, you’ll still need a place to stay now, right? And Cat is very sweet, you’ll like her! It’s basically a treat for you.”

“Why couldn’t you ask someone else?”

“I don’t have time. I want to leave tonight and I don’t want anyone to know I’m gone. That’s the other thing.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you but it’s not anything bad, please.” Yichen grabbed Gong Jun’s arm, nearly setting him off balance. “I don’t want my family to know.”

“Won’t they suspect something when you don’t show up to work?”

Yichen shook his head. “I’m not supposed to be working for a while. And everyone else is going back to Chengdu tonight, they won’t know I’m not here. Junjun, please.”

There were dark circles around his eyes that Gong Jun remembered noticing the last time Yichen had visited home. They were worse now. Staying at Yichen’s house alone would probably be better than staying with Daidai, who still hadn’t learned not to leave all his dishes for the next morning.

“Fine, on one condition.”

“Anything,” Yichen promised.

“Tell me what Professor Li was talking about.”

Yichen directed his gaze at Gong Jun’s knee. “Ah, you know what it’s like, a new place opens and everyone wants to check it out. I’m sure—”

“Not that. The other thing.”

Yichen met his eyes for a moment before he looked away again. “What other thing?”

Gong Jun waited. Yichen knew what he meant.

Yichen sighed and tucked his hands into his sleeves. “You know she’s not at the university anymore.”

“I know.”

“It’s because she left after she lost all her research funding. She thinks that my—that we did that.” Yichen seemed to have shrunk a little while he talked. His shoulders were hunched over and his eyes were still focused on Gong Jun’s knee.

“Did you?” Gong Jun asked.

For a moment, Yichen didn’t say anything. Then he looked back up at Gong Jun. “You know the university is getting a new library? I’ve seen the plans and it’s going to be beautiful. Much better than the one they have now. We gave them the money for that.”

Gong Jun looked back at Yichen steadily. When they were small, all the neighbourhood kids used to play games together. One of their favourite games was stealing fruit from the orchards nearby. Peaches, plums, apricots, they would take whatever they could get their hands on and hide away somewhere to eat their loot, fruit juice running down their hands and staining their mouths. One day, Gong Jun had found Yichen leaving little packets of wildflower seeds on the kitchen windowsill of the house they had stolen fruit from that day.

“It’ll make up for the fruit,” Yichen had said confidently.

A packet of seeds to grow a bunch of flowers no one would eat wasn’t quite the same thing as the armfuls of peaches they’d taken that day, but it hadn’t really mattered very much. A few missing peaches wouldn’t hurt anyone, and no one had minded.

Gong Jun wasn’t sure if Yichen had ever learned that flowers couldn’t make up for peaches.

He stood up and stretched. Yichen was still watching him, waiting for him to say something. His dark circles really were worse than before. “It better be a really nice house,” Gong Jun said.

Yichen beamed at him. “It’s perfect! You’ll like it there, I promise!”

After Yichen had explained to him which food to feed Cat (“We haven’t decided what to name her yet!”) in the morning (only dry food), and which food to feed her at night (one can of Ms Meow’s Scintillating Salmon), and when to give her treats (not every day or she’d start demanding them) and where the spare key was hidden (by the door, under the third flowerpot from the right), Gong Jun finally headed back inside. Yichen hadn’t explained who was included in the “we” that hadn’t bothered to name Cat, but apparently they couldn’t be bothered to look after her either.

His mother cornered him as soon as he made it back to their booth. After she had finished giving him strict instructions to investigate anything he found that seemed remotely suspicious while he was setting Professor Li’s shop in shape, she finally remembered that Gong Jun would need somewhere to stay.

“Daidai has space for me,” Gong Jun said, which probably wasn’t a lie. “If it takes longer than a month, I can find somewhere else to stay.” A sudden rush of customers prevented him from having to tell any further almost-lies.

Six hours later, Gong Jun got off the bus and double checked the map on his phone.

Yichen’s house was right at the end of a little side street filled with tall, narrow houses hidden behind gates set into high walls. Some of the houses had laundry hung outside the gates, others had terracotta pots filled with flowers lined up in a row along their wall. On the wall of one house, a big orange cat was stretched out napping in the sun. It flicked open one eye and watched Gong Jun walk by. Gong Jun nodded hello politely. It never hurt to be on the good side of the neighbourhood cats.

When he got to Yichen’s house, he saw jasmine vines spilling out over the top of the wall. Small vine tendrils hung down from the top and swayed in the breeze, wafting their heady scent through the air. Against the wall, to the right of the gate, were the flowerpots just like Yichen had said. Gong Jun reached under the third pot to retrieve the key and unlatched the gate.

The first thing Gong Jun noticed when he stepped into the courtyard was that Yichen’s house was like a compressed version of the homes in Gong Jun’s own neighbourhood. The courtyard was smaller and narrower than he was used to, but it was swept clean, and there was enough space for a plum tree and a trellis with the jasmine Gong Jun had noticed from outside.

The inside of the house was much neater than Gong Jun had expected from any place Yichen called home. The living room at the front had a bright yellow sofa and some squashy chairs, arranged around a coffee table on a cheerful patterned rug. The walls were lined with shelves of books, another thing that Gong Jun would have never expected from Yichen.

Gong Jun pulled his suitcase through the door at the back of the room and into a hallway with a staircase and two doors on the opposite wall. He left his suitcase in the hall and stepped through the first door into a big, bright kitchen. Two big windows spanned across the back and side of the room and filled the room with light. This room, at least, felt like it could belong to Yichen. There were still dirty dishes in the sink and opening the fridge revealed an assortment of ingredients that wouldn’t make any meal Gong Jun could recognize.

Gong Jun felt something brush against his legs. He looked down and saw the big orange cat that had been lounging outside. “Hello,” he said, crouching down to pet her. “You must be Cat. Did you follow me in?

“Can you show me where your food is kept?” he added, after Cat had been thoroughly petted. “Yichen didn’t tell me and it’s almost time for your dinner.”

Cat leapt up onto the counter and put her paw against the cupboard next to the sink. Gong Jun opened it and saw a bag of dry cat food that had been carefully clipped shut and rows of tins neatly stacked next to it. “Thank you,” he said politely, “but I don’t think you’re allowed on the countertops, are you?”

Cat jumped down and started licking one dainty paw as if she had never done anything wrong. “Thank you,” Gong Jun said again.

Gong Jun walked back out into the hallway and started up the stairs to see the rest of the house. There was even more sun up on the second floor, with no wall outside to block some of it like on the first floor. Gong Jun brought his suitcase into the bedroom and started unpacking. It was easy to shove the few clothes Yichen had left in the wardrobe to the side and move everything in the dresser to the bottom two drawers so he could put his own clothes away. In the bathroom, Gong Jun took all of Yichen’s products and put them in the cupboard under the sink.

There was another room that might have been a second bedroom that had been turned into a workshop. There was a wide wooden workbench in the middle of the room and shelves of jars filled with ingredients Gong Jun recognized from his own family’s workshop. He closed the door behind him after he took a quick look around. It was best not to disturb any work Yichen might have started in there.

Something brushed against his legs again. Cat was rubbing against them and purring.

He knelt down to scratch her head. “I think we’ll manage very nicely here, don’t you?” Cat bumped her head against his hand and purred louder.

It took two weeks for Gong Jun to accept that he wasn’t going to manage very nicely here after all.

For the first week, nothing much happened at all. Gong Jun woke up every day and made sure Cat was fed and watered before he walked to work. Professor Li’s shop was in a neighbourhood just fashionable enough that, despite the fact that the inside of her shop more closely resembled a maze than a store, they had customers wandering in and out all day. The Lius’ store up the street was definitely busier, but Gong Jun didn’t think the situation was unsalvageable.

He set Qiaoqiao to cleaning every day while he hunted through Professor Li’s cupboards for the thick stack of notebooks that were supposedly her sales and inventory records. Once he’d found them all, he spent each day sitting at the front counter with his laptop, reading through them for any information worth keeping and adding items to a spreadsheet. The mess inside the store couldn’t be sorted out until he had figured out a way to catalogue it all.

Halfway through the week, more of his clothes arrived in neatly packed boxes sent to Daidai’s apartment. For the price of a dinner, Gong Jun convinced Daidai to bring the boxes over to Yichen’s house. It was alright if Daidai knew Yichen was gone, Gong Jun reasoned, because Yichen had only said he didn’t want his family to know.

It was on the eighth day that the first strange thing happened. When Gong Jun got out of the shower, there was a smiley face drawn in the condensation on the bathroom mirror. When he returned to style his hair twenty minutes later and it was still there, he took his hairdryer and directed it at the mirror until the condensation evaporated and the smiley face disappeared.

One unexplained smiley face was ignorable. It was a little less ignorable when the books on the living room shelves started moving around. Gong Jun found them on the kitchen table, the sofa. On one memorable occasion, a book found its way onto the bathroom counter.

At first, he tried to put them away. He took a book that had been sitting on the coffee table and placed it back on the shelf. When he came back home, the book was back on the coffee table, and had been joined by three others, like they had banded together as a group and agreed not to be intimidated.

Gong Jun noticed that if he left them alone, the books always made it back to the shelves on their own eventually. The shorter a book was, the faster it would end up back on the shelf.

Cat didn’t seem bothered by these developments so Gong Jun decided not to be bothered either. “You’d tell me if there was a real problem, right?” he asked her one morning while he ate his breakfast. Cat chirped at him and wound around his legs, which seemed like a yes to Gong Jun.

On the last day of the second week, Gong Jun woke up far too early in the morning with a heavy weight on his chest. “You have an automatic feeder,” he said, eyes still closed, when his brain had woken up enough to communicate with his mouth. The weight on his chest didn’t budge, not that he expected it to. Gong Jun had found the feeder in a cupboard on the fifth day. He’d realized by then that Cat trying to wake him up two hours early for her breakfast was going to be a routine and not a fun getting-to-know-you quirk. On the tenth day, Cat had made it clear that no amount of fancy automated food dispensers were going to change her morning routine of settling in comfortably on Gong Jun’s chest and batting at his nose with her paw until he woke up. If he still didn’t wake up, sometimes she moved onto the pillow next to his head and started making soft enquiring meows into his ear until she was fed. The fact that Gong Jun wasn’t the one who would be feeding her had nothing to do with it.

Gong Jun pulled the comforter up to his neck and turned on his side. Cat made a disgruntled mrrp noise as she was tumbled onto the mattress. Before she could let Gong Jun know exactly how she felt about this development, there was a whirr-click noise from downstairs. Gong Jun heard the thump as she leaped on the floor and the tip-tap of her claws as she bounded towards the kitchen. “I told you so,” he said, and tucked himself in tighter.

There was still at least an hour left before he absolutely had to get up, but the light shining against his eyelids was much too bright to let him fall asleep again. He opened his eyes. A heavy set of curtains should have been covering the large bedroom window, blocking out the morning sun until Gong Jun was ready to confront it. The curtains were wide open.

Gong Jun made a face and dragged himself out of bed for just long enough to pull them shut again before he burrowed back under the covers. He was sure he had remembered to close them last night.

After half an hour, during which Gong Jun drifted pleasantly between being fully awake and fully asleep, he scrunched up his face again. Sunlight was blazing against his closed eyelids. He opened his eyes. The curtains were standing open again, as if he had never closed them in the first place.

He pulled the comforter up over his head. He had been waiting for something to happen ever since he arrived. It was Yichen’s house, after all. When they were ten, Yichen had to stay at Gong Jun’s house for a week because his bedroom door had grown roots and sunk into the floorboards. He had just been trying to close it without getting out of bed, he’d explained earnestly. How was he to know the door would take his request to shut itself and stay shut so seriously? They eventually had to use a saw to cut off the roots and open the door again. Curtains that opened when you didn’t want them to were exactly the kind of thing Yichen would make by accident.

Gong Jun was just beginning to fall asleep again when he heard the sound of a bird trilling. He stuck an arm out of his cocoon and swiped haphazardly at his phone screen until the alarm stopped. He allowed himself to indulge in one very dramatic sigh before he forced himself out of bed to get ready for work.

When Gong Jun walked into Professor Li’s shop, Qiaoqiao had already arrived. She was sitting on the floor directing a pile of charm pouches to sew themselves shut with one hand and scrolling through her phone with the other. As she finished each pouch, she waved it into the basket by her feet, where it settled neatly next to the others.

“You know there’s a perfectly nice table for you to work on,” Gong Jun said, shutting the door behind him.

“The floor is comfy,” Qiaoqiao said without looking up at him. “Your breakfast is on the counter.”

Gong Jun crossed over to the counter and poked the bag there suspiciously. “What is it this time?” Qiaoqiao’s roommate made a new batch of buns every morning and Qiaoqiao had roped Gong Jun into taste testing them with her. So far, he had tried red bean paste that tasted like scrambled eggs, mushrooms that tasted like shrimp, and, almost disappointingly, minced pork that tasted like minced pork.

“I haven’t tried mine yet.” Qiaoqiao put her phone down and took the bun Gong Jun passed to her. After a moment of thoughtful chewing, she examined it carefully. “This definitely looks like tofu, right?”

Gong Jun broke his own bun in half. “Yes?”

“Tastes like lychee.”

Gong Jun nibbled cautiously at the bun. He would have liked to have drawn the line at fruit, but he was hungry. It wasn’t so bad if he kept his eyes closed.

He set Qiaoqiao to cleaning the back shelves and settled in his usual spot behind the counter. Halfway through the morning, he remembered the curtains.

“Hey,” he called into the back of the store, “is there a spell to keep curtains closed?”

Qiaoqiao poked her head out from the shelves. “Most people can keep their curtains closed without spells.”

“I can’t.”

“Use some safety pins,” Qiaoqiao said and disappeared into the shelves again.

It wasn’t the worst idea, Gong Jun admitted that night while he safety-pinned the curtains shut. Cat sat on the bed, watching as he placed the safety pins up the length of the curtains.

“It’s my day off tomorrow,” he told Cat while he worked. “I’m sleeping in until at least 9am.”

Cat wrapped her tail around her front paws and looked at him innocently.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” he told her sternly and petted her head. Cat pushed her head up into his palm and purred.

The next morning, Gong Jun woke up to a room filled with sun and a face full of fur. He turned his back to the window and pulled the comforter above his head. As expected, Cat took this opportunity to sneak under the covers and crouch next to his chest, purring expectantly. There was something wrong, Gong Jun thought drowsily, although he was very warm and comfortable.

When he realized what it was, he pulled the comforter down again and twisted around to look at the window, making Cat scoot away from him with a startled meow. The curtains were wide open.

Curtains that opened on their own were fine, but curtains that could undo safety pins were a different sort of problem. He sank back into bed. Whatever it was, surely it would still be a problem later in the morning after he’d gotten more sleep. He turned away from the window again and froze. There on the bedside table were the safety pins, all pinned together in a bundle.

“Maybe the house is haunted,” Daidai suggested that afternoon. He was sitting at the kitchen table examining the safety pins. Gong Jun had left them pinned together. Daidai picked the bundle up and turned it over in his hand.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Gong Jun said absently. The kettle he’d filled with enough water for two people now seemed to only have enough for one. He poured the steaming water into one mug and refilled the kettle.

“Cat would tell us if there was a ghost anyway, wouldn’t you Cat?” Daidai asked, scratching her under the chin. Cat angled her head just right for extra scritches and chirped at him. “It would be just like Yichen to not tell you his house was haunted, though.” Daidai had only met them in university, but he’d had no trouble figuring out what kind of person Yichen was right away.

Gong Jun set the mug down on the table in front of Daidai. “You’re not supposed to be on the table,” he said to Cat. She stepped down to settle on Daidai’s lap instead, throwing a look at Gong Jun. He sat down across from Daidai. “Ghosts still aren’t real.”

“That you know of.”

“That’s not all.” When Gong Jun had checked the living room that morning, the books on all the shelves had been rearranged by colour.

“A ghost who likes to redecorate,” Daidai offered. He fiddled with the safety pins again. They looked almost like a sculpture, although Gong Jun wasn’t sure of what. “Hey, maybe it’s like those stories.”

“What stories?”

“You know. The ones where some guy lives in an apartment for years and has a nice normal life but then he finds out that someone has been living under his kitchen sink or whatever the whole time.”

Gong Jun felt a shiver travel down his spine. “No.”

“It happens all the time.”

“No, it does not,” Gong Jun said firmly.

The kettle clicked off. Gong Jun turned in his chair to get up and stopped. The kettle was flickering on its base. As Gong Jun watched, it winked out of existence.

“Okay,” Daidai said, setting Cat back on the table. “Maybe not a guy living under your sink, then.”

He crossed the kitchen to examine where the kettle had been. He ran his finger over the base and frowned.

“What is it?”

“It’s not magic exactly,” Daidai said, “but it’s not not magic.” The kettle reappeared. It was completely empty. “Yichen definitely didn’t tell you about this on purpose.”

Empty kettles felt a little worse than moving books and opening curtains. The water had to have gone somewhere.

Gong Jun pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked his messages. The picture he’d sent of Cat eating her dinner to let Yichen know he’d arrived still had an unread tag next to it. “I sent him a message when I got here but he still hasn’t read it.”

“When you got here? So you haven’t heard anything in two weeks?” Daidai moved back to the table and sat down. “Where did he say he was going?”

“He didn’t.”

Daidai tapped the side of his mug. “Do you think he was working on something weird?”

“Like what?”

Daidai shrugged. “Try asking Lihua tonight. She’s the only person I know who might still be in touch with him, besides you.”

“What does that mean?” Yichen had always been the kind of person who got along with everyone. It was true Gong Jun hadn’t heard much from him recently, but that was just because they lived a train ride away from each other.

Daidai shrugged again. “I don’t think I’ve seen him around much. He’s always working.

“Anyway,” he added, checking the time on his phone, “come on, we’re going to be late. You can ask Lihua when we get there.”

The thing about going out with your university friends when none of you were in university anymore, Gong Jun remembered sometime in between the second and third bar, was that you could act like you were still twenty years old, but your body took great delight in telling you that was not the case.

“Are you drunk?” Lihua asked him in what she seemed to think was a whisper. She sank down onto the couch next to him. Gong Jun looked at her carefully until she came into focus. He was supposed to ask Lihua something, he was pretty sure, but she had been talking to someone else earlier when he wanted to ask and now he couldn’t remember what it was.

“Junjun never gets drunk!” Daidai threw an arm around his shoulder.

“I’m not,” Gong Jun said, because Daidai had said he never got drunk and therefore he must not be. He took another sip of the fruity drink Daidai had shoved into his hand at some point he could no longer remember. It tasted like pineapple. Gong Jun hated pineapples. Daidai’s own drink had a big strawberry on the rim. Daidai should’ve given him the drink with strawberries. He was about to tell Daidai this, but when he turned to look at him, Daidai was gone.

He was probably somewhere on the other side of the room, maybe with a secret strawberry drink stash. He looked at the table. There was a tray of fruit there. Grapes, melon, kiwi, but no strawberries.

“I need strawberries,” he announced to the room at large.

“What are you going to do with them?” Lihua was leaning into his side, half asleep.

This was a good question. “Eat them,” he said when he’d turned it over in his mind sufficiently. “There aren’t any strawberries here,” he added, remembering the second important point of his problem.

Lihua furrowed her brow and propped up her face with one hand. “Where are they?”

This was also a good question. There was a reason Lihua had always gotten higher marks than the rest of them. “In the fridge,” Gong Jun said, after he had taken another sip of his pineapple drink to inspire thought.

Lihua nodded. “Gotta go home then.”

“Home,” Gong Jun echoed. Home was far away and it would take too long to get there. Then he remembered. “Not at home,” he explained to Lihua, who couldn’t be expected to know absolutely everything. “At Yichen’s house.”

Lihua stared at him. “Are you living at Yichen’s house?”

“Yes, but shh, it’s a secret.” Lihua was good at keeping secrets so it was fine to tell her.

She put a finger to her lips and nodded solemnly. “You must have met his someone or other then.”

“His what?”

“He’s dating someone.” Lihua frowned. “I think.”

That sounded right to Gong Jun. Yichen was usually dating someone. He remembered what Yichen had said about Cat’s name. “Someone who doesn’t know how to name cats,” he confided to Lihua. But Yichen wasn’t important right now. “The strawberries,” he reminded her. “They’re already washed.” This was very important. He needed Lihua to know how important it was.

“You should go eat them.”

Gong Jun should. He just couldn’t quite figure out how to get up.

“It’s time to go home, you two.”

Gong Jun looked up. It couldn’t be time to go home because he was pretty sure this was only bar number three and there was no way they could be going home before bar number four. And there was still something he was supposed to ask Lihua.

Daidai pulled him to his feet. Daidai had eaten strawberries. If Gong Jun went home, he could have his own strawberries.

He let Daidai steer him into a taxi waiting outside and leaned against his shoulder when he followed him in. Gong Jun was vaguely aware that Lihua was there too, on Daidai’s other side, muttering something about Yichen, but that didn’t seem important right now.

The taxi ride home was long enough to lull Gong Jun into a doze. By the time they had dropped Lihua home and Daidai had helped him out of the car, he was ready to fall into bed. But first. He walked into the kitchen and made a beeline for the fridge.

The container was exactly where he expected it to be, but when he pulled off the lid and looked inside, there was only one strawberry left. A big bite had been taken out of it so it was more leaf than berry.

He stared at the container for a long moment. The strawberry juice had stained the corner a pinkish red.

Something brushed against his legs. He looked down and saw Cat. “It’s theft,” he explained to her. She meowed at him questioningly. “That’s true,” he said. How was anyone to know they were his strawberries if he didn’t tell them?

He turned on his heel and rummaged through the kitchen drawers until he found a roll of masking tape and a marker. Ten minutes later, every container and jar in the fridge had a masking tape label attached that read Property of Gong Jun. Do not touch!!! He thought for a moment and then labelled all the jars and containers in the pantry as well. When he was sure there was nothing edible left in the kitchen that hadn’t been marked as his, he finally set the tape and marker down and went upstairs.

The sunshine that poured in through his window the next morning felt like a personal insult. It had been 3am when Gong Jun had finally stumbled into bed. He squinted at his phone. It was 7am now. The comforter pulled over his head did little to block out the light. After a few minutes of trying uselessly to get back to sleep, Gong Jun gave up and dragged himself out of bed. A shower would make him feel like enough of a person again to venture out into the world for breakfast.

In the bathroom, Gong Jun leaned against the side of the shower and let the hot water wash over him. Going out last night had been a mistake. Or maybe not entirely a mistake, he amended as he gathered the strength to raise his arms and wash his hair, but the last few drinks and the third bar, and maybe the second bar, those were definitely a mistake.

He turned off the water and opened the shower curtain. He reached for his towel and then stopped. Something wasn’t quite right. His clothes were lying discarded on the floor where he had left them and his slippers were by the door, where they should be. His toothbrush was in its holder on the counter next to his toothpaste and razor, as expected. He looked up at the mirror. There was a man there looking back at him.

The man looked as shocked as Gong Jun felt, although that didn’t stop his eyes from darting down Gong Jun’s body. Gong Jun yelped and moved to yank the curtain shut.

“Wait!”

“For what??” Gong Jun asked. The man was at least keeping his eyes on Gong Jun’s now.

“We can finally talk now!”

“Like this??” Strangers weren’t supposed to show up in bathroom mirrors and they certainly weren’t supposed to suggest they have a chat.

“Here, I’ll close my eyes. You can grab a towel and then it’ll be fine, right?” It was mostly definitely not fine. “I think if you close the curtain, we won’t be able to see or hear each other anymore,” the stranger added. This was exactly what Gong Jun was aiming for. “You’re Gong Jun, right?”

Gong Jun paused mid-towel grab. “How do you know my name?”

“How could I miss it?” The man was grinning. “‘Property of Gong Jun. Do not touch!!!’ Can I open my eyes yet?”

“No.” Gong Jun wrapped the towel around his waist tightly. When he was done, he finally had a chance to look at the man properly. His hair was just long enough to curl slightly where it brushed his shoulders. He was leaning forwards like he wanted a closer look. In the reflection behind him was a room that looked startlingly like Gong Jun’s own bathroom, but the towels were purple instead of blue. Gong Jun double checked the towel was wrapped securely. “You can open them now.”

The man opened his eyes immediately and gave Gong Jun a wide, friendly smile. “What did you use on the stuff in the kitchen, by the way? It’s really strong.”

The kitchen, his strawberries. Gong Jun remembered now. “Tape?” It was just ordinary masking tape, Gong Jun was pretty sure.

The man laughed. “No I mean, what spell did you use? Is it just a keep-away spell? It’s the strongest one I’ve ever seen.”

Gong Jun didn’t think Yichen was likely to be keeping a roll of tape around that repelled things. That was the opposite of the point of tape. “I don't think the tape was spelled?”

“Not until you slapped it on everything and said no touching,” the man agreed. “Is that all you did?”

“Yes?”

“Not bad. Not elegant exactly, but very effective.” The man grinned at him again.

Gong Jun was sure that if just writing things down was enough to make them happen, he would have known by now.

“Who are you? And how are you in my mirror?” he asked. He had more questions than that but it would do for a start.

“Zhang Zhehan. I live here.”

“And where exactly," Gong Jun asked, “is here?” People couldn’t live in mirrors, but bathroom mirrors were always charmed against scrying, so Zhang Zhehan couldn’t be anywhere else either.

Zhang Zhehan looked like he was delighted by the question. “I can tell you, but it might be easier if you tell me where you are first.”

“I asked you first,” Gong Jun pointed out. “And you’re the one who showed up in my mirror.”

“You’re in mine too!” Zhang Zhehan protested.

Gong Jun hadn’t considered that. He frowned then settled on what seemed like the simplest answer to the question. “I’m in Shanghai.”

Zhang Zhehan nodded. “So am I. But I think maybe not the same one.”

Gong Jun stared at him. There was only one Shanghai. It was a big city. He would have noticed if there were two.

Zhang Zhehan saw the look on his face and laughed. “I was going to ask which world you were in but it looks like that might be the wrong question.”

There was only one world, too. Another fact Gong Jun felt very confident about.

“I haven't had to explain this to anyone in a while,” Zhang Zhehan said, scrunching up his nose. “Let’s see how I do.” He got a look on his face that Gong Jun recognized from watching his younger cousins recite multiplication tables from memory. “Every time there’s a major event that could have more than one outcome, the world splits and forms new worlds to account for each outcome. I’m not sure when your world and mine diverged, although it was long ago enough that even though your world has magic, you don't seem to have any idea what I’m talking about, so you’re not from any of the catalogued worlds.” He smiled at Gong Jun again. “Does that make any sense or did I confuse you more?”

Gong Jun wished he wasn’t still in the shower so he could sit down. “Let’s just—” He put a hand on the wall to steady himself. It was unfair of anyone to expect him to hold a proper conversation naked and hungover and hungry. “Let’s just say all of that’s true. If you’re in a separate world, why are you also in my bathroom? And my kitchen.” The books moving around, the kettle disappearing and emptying itself, everything he had blamed on Yichen’s magic gone wrong might have been, was probably, Zhang Zhehan. He remembered the curtains. “And my bedroom.”

“Well, I’m not, am I?” Gong Jun wondered if Zhang Zhehan ever didn’t smile. “Even now I’m only in your mirror, right?”

“And I’m in yours,” Gong Jun said slowly.

“Right. I think maybe sometimes your house and my house are the same place, but I don’t know why. I thought you might know.”

Gong Jun shook his head. Water droplets dripped off the ends of his hair. “It’s not actually my house. I’m just looking after it for a friend.”

“It’s not my house either. I’m just renting because my apartment was flooded and I needed somewhere to stay while it gets fixed up.” Zhang Zhehan didn’t seem to mind that Gong Jun didn’t have anything useful to tell him. If anything, he looked even more delighted.

“So what are we supposed to—wait!” Gong Jun lurched forward. Zhang Zhehan’s face was starting to fade away in the mirror.

“Listen to me,” Zhehan said quickly, leaning forward even more like that might slow down the way he was going blurry at the edges. “You can send things to me but I can’t send them to you. Get me a notebook and pen. Try using the fridge. Tell them where to go!” His eyes widened before his face faded completely.

Gong Jun looked down. His towel had dropped to the floor.

Half an hour later, Gong Jun opened the fridge and tucked a notepad and a pen next to the carton of eggs. He closed the door and hesitated. He opened the fridge again. “Please go to Zhang Zhehan,” he told the notepad and pen firmly, feeling a little foolish. He wasn’t sure it would help at all, but the world seemed to have quite a few more possibilities inside and outside of it since he woke up that morning.

Gong Jun sat on his stool behind the front counter and tapped his pen against the notebook in front of him. The rain had been pattering steadily outside all day. The shop had been empty enough that he’d finally managed to make it through the last six months’ worth of notebooks. He traced a finger around the coffee ring on the page he had open. Professor Li seemed to have developed a habit of leaving her mugs on top of her open notebooks in the last three months. The paper under his finger felt distorted where the liquid had settled into it. The feeling of the paper against his skin, the sound of raindrops hitting the window, these things were reassuringly real. Gong Jun could almost convince himself that the events of that morning hadn’t happened.

Qiaoqiao was sitting at the table in front of the window, theoretically working on replenishing their stock of glow charms, although Gong Jun suspected she was actually working on getting the magnolia flowers on her nails to bloom without the colours running. She wouldn’t notice if he, for example, decided to look someone up online.

He pulled his laptop closer and opened a browser window. Searching for Zhang Zhehan didn’t give him much. He scrolled through the first few hits. There was a mechanic in Changsha and a florist in Hangzhou with the same name. He searched again for Zhang Zhehan Shanghai. This time there was nothing.

“Who’s Zhang Zhehan?”

Gong Jun jumped in his seat and slammed his laptop shut. Qiaoqiao was standing just behind him. “Can you walk noisier or something?”

“Answer the question,” she said. She hoisted herself up to sit on the counter.

“He’s just…someone I met.”

“You don’t go anywhere,” Qiaoqiao said promptly. “How did you meet someone?”

“He’s…a neighbour.” That was true enough that Gong Jun decided it didn’t count as a lie.

“Got it.” Qiaoqiao pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged. She looked very comfortable. “Was he cute?”

Gong Jun rolled his eyes. “I didn’t notice.”

Qiaoqiao nodded sagely. “He was, then.”

“I didn’t notice!”

“If he wasn’t cute, you would have just said that, so he is.”

Gong Jun thought of the way Zhang Zhehan’s eyes had scrunched up when he smiled. “Okay, whatever. That’s not important.” The bell over the door sounded. “And get off the counter, it’s unprofessional.”

“No, it’s good. It makes the shopping experience memorable.” She waved to the woman who had just walked in, then picked up Gong Jun’s pen and started chewing on the end. The woman smiled uncertainly and walked to the back shelves. “Okay, so you met someone cute and you want to know if he’s a normal person, right? But what, you can’t find him online?”

“That’s…” Gong Jun sighed. “Yeah, let’s just say that.”

“Maybe he’s a serial killer.”

“He’s not a serial killer,” Gong Jun protested.

Qiaoqiao didn’t look impressed by this. She tapped the pen against her lips. “When did you meet him?”

“This morning,” Gong Jun admitted.

“Wow and you’re already looking him up? He must be really really cute.”

“I said he wasn’t cute,” Gong Jun said loudly. He heard a squeak and a thump from the back shelves like someone had dropped something. “Sorry!” he called out. “Please let us know if you need help finding anything!”

“I want to know if there are any developments.” Qiaoqiao slipped off the counter and walked back to her table. “And you never said he wasn’t cute, by the way. But nice to know it’s still on your mind.”

Gong Jun waited until Qiaoqiao had started painting her nails again before he hid his face in his hands.

Gong Jun wasn't sure exactly what he expected when he got home, but it was still a little bit of a surprise to see a folded note standing on the coffee table. Well, sort of on the coffee table. The paper had a fluttery, uncertain air to it. Bits of it kept going transparent. When Gong Jun touched it, it solidified in his hand. The words welcome home were written on it in big letters.

He looked around the room and saw a note on the sofa. This one had a big number one written on it. There was another paper on an armchair, and one folded into a paper airplane and balanced carefully on top of a globe on the bookshelf.

He wandered through the house looking for more. Some of the papers had labels identifying their locations, some of them just had numbers. Next to Cat’s water bowl he found one that, when he unfolded it, revealed a drawing of an unfortunate creature with three legs and a tail. There was a little arrow pointing to it with the word cat. Gong Jun's mouth twitched. He tucked the note in his pocket with the others.

Stuck to the fridge, he found three pieces of paper covered top to bottom in a messy scrawl. He pulled them off the fridge and started reading through them. There was a lot in there about something called the theory of parallelities and a lot more about something called dimensional reality, which sounded too much like math. Gong Jun decided to ignore this.

The last page was the only one that made any sense at all. Gong Jun read through the instructions written there, then looked up at the big clock on the kitchen wall. He had just enough time to pull on a slightly nicer shirt and refluff his hair.

It wasn’t, he told himself while he adjusted his hair in the mirror, that he needed to impress anyone. It was just good manners to look nice when you saw people.

He stepped into the shower and pulled the curtain shut. There was another note, folded into a star and standing on top of the shower faucet. Gong Jun unfolded it. This one had a stick figure that was, Gong Jun squinted, in the shower and maybe washing its hair. It had three legs. Next to the stick figure, written in now familiar handwriting, was Gong Jun’s own name. He looked back at the stick figure's legs. After a moment, he blushed.

He could feel his face was still pink when he yanked the curtains open. Zhehan was there, just like this morning, smiling cheerfully at him in the mirror.

“I got your notes.” Gong Jun waved the stick figure drawing at him. “All of them,” he added meaningfully.

Zhehan’s smile widened. “Hang on, I made a list. We can check.”

Maybe he often left mildly obscene stick drawings for people, Gong Jun thought, as Zhehan rattled off the locations of every note he’d left. It seemed like that was maybe something he would do.

“Okay, that’s all of them.” Zhehan looked back up at Gong Jun in the mirror. “You said some of them weren’t quite there?”

“Yeah, they were kind of flickery? When I touched them they firmed up.”

Zhehan tapped his pencil against his lip. “Which ones were those?”

“Mostly the ones in the living room, and the one in the laundry room.”

“Do you spend a lot of time in those rooms?”

“Me? No?”

Zhehan learned forward and wrote something down. “I wonder if you’re activating something by accident,” he said almost to himself, “or maybe some parts of our houses are tied together more strongly than others?” He scribbled down something else.

“It can’t be me,” Gong Jun said. “I don’t have any magic.”

Zhehan flicked his eyes up at him, still leaning over whatever he was writing on. “You do.”

“I don't.”

Zhehan straightened up and looked at him more intently. “Why are you so sure?”

“I—” Gong Jun stopped. The last time he’d had to have a conversation like this was when he first went to university. It took most of his first semester for people to finally stop asking. “I just know,” he said. “I don't have any magic. Trust me, people have looked.”

“I might see something they haven’t,” Zhehan offered.

“Yes,” Gong Jun said, “that’s what people usually say.”

Zhehan tilted his head to the side and looked at him for a long moment. He smiled slowly. “Okay. I don’t need you to have magic to help me figure out what’s going on here, though. Do you want to help?”

Gong Jun dropped his shoulders ever so slightly. He held up the notes that had been stuck to the fridge. “Does helping mean I have to understand all this?”

Zhehan laughed. “Definitely not. I just want to do some experiments. And find out what’s going on with this house.”

Gong Jun smiled back. “I can help, then. What do you want me to do next?”

Zhehan beamed at him. “Let me make a plan. I’ll put it on the fridge again tomorrow morning.”

Over the next two weeks, Gong Jun sent Zhehan books, and paperweights, and bottles of shampoo. He tested sending things at different times of day and in different rooms. Everything he sent always managed to come back, although not always in the way he expected.

“I wanted to know what would happen if I kept the bottles where they were but switched the contents,” Zhehan explained after Gong Jun found he’d squeezed shampoo onto his sponge instead of dish detergent.

“At least I realized before I tried to wash my hair with the dish detergent,” Gong Jun told Cat, while he emptied the shampoo out of the dish detergent bottle and back into its own bottle.

“You work hard,” Zhehan commented one day, after he had made Gong Jun spend three hours moving the same orchid to different rooms just to see if things could move to Zhehan’s world faster from one room than another.

“So do you,” Gong Jun pointed out. He had caught glimpses of the notebook Zhehan was scribbling in, in the bathroom mirror. The pages were covered with messy notes and diagrams.

“That’s different. It’s my job.”

“It’s your job to investigate strange houses?”

Zhehan laughed. “Sort of? I research other worlds. I’m supposed to be on vacation now, though.” He put down his pen and stretched his arms up above his head. “Should we stop for the day?”

“If you want,” Gong Jun said. He leaned back against the shower wall. “I should cook dinner anyway.”

“You can cook?”

“You can’t?”

“I never learned.” Zhehan ran his hand through his hair sheepishly. “But I should have known you could,” he added with another quick smile. “You’ve got that good boy vibe.”

“Good boy vibe?”

“You know, with the hair and the following directions and everything, you just look very nice. Like you always listened to your parents and stuff.”

Gong Jun thought his parents would probably have something to say about that assessment. And his friends. And most of the people who knew him.

“Anyway,” Zhehan said, “same time tomorrow? I want to see if we can do the shower curtain trick with anything else.”

“Okay,” Gong Jun agreed. He was about to yank the curtain shut again when he hesitated. “If you don’t have anything to eat, do you want me to try sending you dinner? I have enough for two.”

Zhehan grinned at him. “See what I mean? Good boy.”

Gong Jun ignored the blush warming his cheeks. “Is that a yes or a no?”

“Yes, please!”

Gong Jun shut the curtain.

It was probably overkill to cook this much food, all just for two people, but it was nice to have variety, Gong Jun thought while he packed half of everything in containers. And Zhehan had said he didn’t cook, so leftovers would be useful for him.

“And we’re basically roommates so it’s good manners to share food, right?” Gong Jun said to Cat.

Cat jumped up on the counter and pawed at the cupboard door where her food was kept.

“Yes, you’re also my roommate.” Gong Jun closed the last lid and stacked the containers on the counter before crossing over to Cat’s cupboard and opening it. Her cans of food were flickering in and out. “Stop that,” he scolded. The cans solidified in the cupboard. He took one can and spooned the contents in Cat’s food bowl.

The edges of things had gotten fuzzy ever since he’d started helping Zhehan with his experiments. It was particularly bad in the kitchen, where he could never be sure what he’d see when he opened the cupboards.

Halfway through eating his own dinner at the kitchen table, he looked up and saw the containers he’d packed for Zhehan still sitting on the counter. He hesitated for a moment and then said firmly, “Please deliver yourself to Zhang Zhehan.”

The containers disappeared.

Gong Jun went back to his dinner. He had mentioned this to Zhehan, the way everything in his cupboards kept flickering and that things seemed to travel over to him faster if Gong Jun told them to.

“You said last time the notes were flickering because they were in rooms I don’t spend a lot of time in. I spend lots of time in the kitchen,” Gong Jun had said.

Zhehan tapped his pen against his notebook. The margins were filled with doodles. “I think I was right about that,” he said. “If I’m trying to send something back to you, the flickering is because it doesn’t work very well. This is something else. Does it only happen when you open something? Like a cupboard?”

Gong Jun nodded. “The kitchen cupboards, or my wardrobe, or the bathroom cabinets. Not any of the room doors, though.” They had already tried all the doors in the house to see if they would work the same as the shower curtain, but nothing had happened.

“Doors but not real doorways,” Zhehan mused. “Why not doorways?” He turned his notebook sideways and wrote something under a diagram.

“They stop if I ask them to, just like things disappear faster when I tell them where to go.”

Zhehan tilted his head to one side like he did when he was thinking. “Keep doing that, then,” he said. “I want to see what happens.”

Zhehan said that a lot, Gong Jun was learning. It was the reason he gave when Gong Jun finally asked him why he’d eaten his strawberries.

“You weren’t paying attention to me! I needed you to notice me,” Zhehan said. “I tried to refill the container with tomatoes at first, but they wouldn’t go anywhere. So I thought of the most annoying thing I could do, so you’d care enough to try and do something about it.”

Gong Jun thought of the single strawberry with a bite taken out of it. “It worked.”

“It did,” Zhang Zhehan agreed. “I’d been trying to leave notes on the fridge, on your bedside table, nothing gets across unless it comes over from your world first. I tried to send myself over too, but there’s nothing there. No pathway, no gate. And I don’t know where you are, exactly, otherwise I could have made a gate myself.”

“You can do that?”

“I can, if I have help, but it’s exhausting.” Zhehan grinned. “Much easier if someone’s already made a convenient little doorway for me.”

“But it’s possible? For people to go back and forth like that?”

“Why? You want to come visit?”

Gong Jun looked down and picked a nonexistent bit of fluff off his sleeve. “It could be fun.”

“I could buy you dinner to make up for all the food you’ve been cooking me.”

Gong Jun looked up at the mirror. Zhehan was scribbling something in his notebook again. He was barely paying attention to Gong Jun.

After the first time, he had started sending dinner to Zhehan every night. And every morning, when he walked into the kitchen, his containers would be sitting on the kitchen counter, washed and with a note written on paper torn from the notepad Gong Jun had sent Zhehan that first day. Gong Jun learned that the spicier his food was, the more likely he was to get a big smiley face in return. He learned that if he put coriander on anything, the next morning he would find the coriander in a little heap in his garbage. He learned, too, that Zhehan would always tell him how delicious everything tasted, no matter what Gong Jun made him.

“It’s not any more work,” he had said when Zhehan asked. “I’m used to cooking for more than just one person anyway.”

“You don’t usually live alone then, I guess?” Zhehan had been scribbling something in his notebook during that conversation too.

“With my family.”

“Oh.” Zhehan scribbled a little more furiously. “When you say family, as in you’re married?”

“No!” Gong Jun surprised himself with how loud his voice sounded, echoing against the bathroom tile. “Definitely not. Not even close. I live with my parents.”

“Oh.” Zhehan looked back up at Gong Jun. He looked pleased. “Me neither. I’m not married, I mean. Not even close. Just me and Lufei, my dog.”

Gong Jun tried not to smile too much at that.

Qiaoqiao didn’t seem to think their dinners were as simple as Gong Jun did. “You cook dinner for him every single night?” she asked when Gong Jun mentioned it.

Gong Jun kept his eyes on his laptop. “Neighbours are basically roommates. Your roommate cooks for you, too.”

“My roommate creates food monstrosities and uses me as her victim. You’re doing something very different.”

Gong Jun continued to focus on his new store layout plan. He was here to make Professor Li’s shop beautiful. It needed his full concentration. And besides, both Qiaoqiao and Zhehan were getting food made for them by someone they lived with, sort of, so it was exactly the same.

“Have you actually asked him out yet?”

“No.” Gong Jun had already found out there was no point explaining he wasn’t interested in Zhehan like that.

“Understandable. There’s just so much on your mind what with all the food you’re cooking.”

There was a lot on Gong Jun’s mind, although Qiaoqiao didn’t know about it. Yichen hadn’t read his messages for a month, and Zhehan hadn’t found out anything useful from his landlady for the house in his world, either.

“She’s this little old lady who can’t even charm a spoon to stir her tea for her,” Zhehan explained. “The previous tenant must know something, but the landlady won’t give me their name.”

Gong Jun had tried to look through Yichen’s workshop again too, but he hadn’t found anything strange at all. Yichen hadn’t left many notes and all the ingredients he kept were familiar, except a few empty tins of something called Candy Courage. The tagline on the tin was Confidence you can eat. Gong Jun threw out the tins when he’d finished looking through the workshop. Yichen was the last person he would have thought needed confidence.

There was one other thing on Gong Jun’s mind. Zhehan still didn’t seem to have given up on the idea that Gong Jun had some magic.

“I know you said you don’t, but—”

“I really don’t,” Gong Jun said. This was the fourth time Zhehan had tried to ask. Gong Jun wasn’t surprised. No one ever gave up the first time round.

Zhehan nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry I keep asking.” He hesitated, then spoke again. “How did the soft boiled egg charm I gave you work out?”

Gong Jun let out his breath slowly. Zhehan might keep asking, but he was much less insistent than other people had been. “You know I don’t need a charm to make soft boiled eggs, right?”

Zhehan grinned at him. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a master chef. Did you try it anyway?”

Gong Jun had tried it that afternoon. It was a strange little charm. Just a picture of something Zhehan claimed was an egg sketched on a scrap of paper. He had put the charm on the counter and put a bowl filled with water and three eggs on top of it, just like Zhehan had told him to. Then he’d closed his eyes and imagined a perfectly cooked soft boiled egg, a runny yolk set in just-cooked-enough whites. When he opened his eyes, all the water from the bowl was gone and the eggs were warm to the touch. He cracked one of them into a second bowl. It was cooked perfectly.

“I can’t believe it worked,” Gong Jun said. “It didn’t exactly look impressive.”

“The cooking skill of the person using it matters,” Zhehan explained. “It wouldn’t have worked if I’d tried it.”

“Why?” Gong Jun had never heard of a charm that worked better for some people than others.

“I can explain,” Zhehan said, “but it might work better if I show you something first.” He looked a bit nervous, though Gong Jun couldn’t see why he would be. “You said if you tell something to go to me, it disappears right away, right?”

“Right.” They had already tested what happened if Gong Jun didn’t tell items to deliver themselves to Zhehan. Sometimes they showed up hours later, and sometimes they didn’t show up at all. And, of course, some things, like the water in his kettle, travelled to Zhehan whether Gong Jun wanted them to or not.

“I want to see it happen. Just in case I notice something.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure,” Zhehan admitted. “But it’s worth a try.”

“Okay,” Gong Jun agreed easily. He wasn’t sure what Zhehan would be able to notice either, but after two weeks he’d learned that if Zhehan said it was worth trying, then he was probably right. He leaned out of the shower to pick up a face towel from the basket on the bathroom counter. “Does this work?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, I’m doing it now.” Gong Jun put the towel on the counter. “Please go to Zhang Zhehan,” he said. The towel disappeared. He looked up and saw Zhehan waving the towel at him in the mirror.

“Can you try again with another towel and this time ask it to land in my hand?”

Gong Jun took another towel from the basket and put it on the counter. “Please land in Zhang Zhehan’s hand.” When he looked up, Zhehan was holding the towel.

“Why are you saying please, by the way?”

“Oh...it’s…polite.”

“Try without saying please this time,” Zhehan said, barely hiding a smile.

Gong Jun tried again. The towel disappeared and reappeared in Zhehan’s hand again.

Zhehan bit his lip, narrowing his eyes. “Okay, I think—no wait—this time let’s try something different.” He leaned to the side like he was trying to see around Gong Jun. “See that purple bottle in your shower?”

“The shower gel?”

“Yeah. Hold out your hand and ask it to come to you.”

Gong Jun stared at him. “Why would that work?”

“Just trust me. I’m positive it’ll work. You just need to concentrate really hard and want it to land in your hand, okay?”

Gong Jun looked at him uncertainly. This wasn’t the same thing as what they’d been doing at all.

“Look, it worked with the tape, right? When you didn’t want me to touch your food? This is the same as that. It’s just you wanting something to happen.”

“And then…what? The house makes it happen?” That didn’t really make sense either, but it was the best explanation Gong Jun could think of.

“I’ll explain but let’s just try it first.” Zhehan looked nervous again.

Gong Jun still wasn’t sure, but he held out his hand.

“Close your eyes if it helps.”

Gong Jun closed his eyes and saw the bottle of shower gel sitting clearly in his shower basket. He imagined it landing in his hand. “Shower gel, come over here.”

He felt something smooth and heavy land in his hand. When he opened his eyes, the purple bottle was in his hand, right where Zhehan said it would be.

“Why did that work?” He looked up at Zhehan in the mirror. “I don’t understand. So whatever spell is on the house, it’s not just about sending things back and forth from my world to yours? It can do things like this, too?”

Zhehan took a deep breath. “Okay,” he started. “Please don’t be angry. I lied to you.”

“What?”

“It’s not the house. It’s you.”

“What?” Gong Jun said again.

“I know you said you don’t have magic, but you do. I can see it.” Zhehan was talking faster now. “I’m not saying this whole thing is you. Whatever is happening to connect your world and mine was already happening. But the tape, and the sending things to me, and the eggs, and this, just now, that’s all you.”

Gong Jun opened his mouth to say something but Zhehan kept going.

“I already knew it was you, but you were so sure it wasn’t, and I thought there must be a good reason for that, so that’s why I did this tonight, so I could watch while you were actually doing it, and it really is you, Gong Jun, I can see your magic.”

“No,” Gong Jun shook his head. His hands were cold. “It’s not. You’re wrong.”

“Gong Jun, there’s no other explanation. That charm I sent you wasn’t even a charm. It was just a doodle on a piece of paper.”

“You’re wrong,” Gong Jun said again, louder than before. “You’re just missing something. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something else.” Zhehan started talking again but Gong Jun just spoke over him. “I would know by now. You don’t get it. I would know.”

“You wouldn’t be the first person whose magic was a surprise to them. I’ve met lots of others.”

“I’m twenty-seven,” Gong Jun said. “People looked.”

“There must have been something, anything, that happened when you were a kid that you couldn’t explain. Something small that people would have missed. I told you I can see it,” Zhehan said when Gong Jun just shook his head. “I can see you using magic.”

“No,” Gong Jun said. “You’re wrong. How can you see anything? You’re in a completely different world, looking at me through a mirror. If you were here, you’d be able to see clearly.”

Zhehan started talking again but Gong Jun was tired. So many people had told him he must have magic, but no one had ever gone so far as to claim they could see it. He was still holding the shower gel, he realized. He shoved it back in the basket and yanked the shower curtain shut. When he opened it again, Zhehan was gone.

He walked out of the bathroom and yanked off his t-shirt and crawled into bed. Cat was already there. Gong Jun pressed his face against her fur.

Zhehan was wrong. The mirror was distorting things somehow, making him see things that weren’t really there. If he had been here, instead of in some other world, then he would have seen so very clearly that Gong Jun didn’t have any magic at all.

It was a long time before Gong Jun fell asleep. When he closed his eyes, he could see Zhehan, standing right there in front of him, with the same disappointed look in his eyes that people had always gotten, until they stopped expecting anything of Gong Jun at all.

When he woke up the next morning, his entire body felt heavy. Cat must have moved to settle by his hip because he could feel a dip in the mattress. Gong Jun kept his eyes shut and moved his hand down to pet her. When his hand met empty air, he frowned. He patted around the mattress. There was something else there, something warm, but it wasn’t Cat.

Gong Jun opened his eyes. There was a person sitting on his bed and his hand was on their hip.

Gong Jun yelped and pulled his hand back, scrambling to sit up and pull the comforter up to his neck.

“Good morning,” Zhehan said.

Gong Jun considered for a moment just closing his eyes. Maybe he’d fall asleep again and find he was dreaming the whole time. It seemed like it was worth a shot. But then Zhehan put his hand on Gong Jun’s knee. Gong Jun jumped.

“I’m just—letting you know I’m real,” Zhehan said. He pulled his hand back.

It was probably rude to keep staring at him, but Gong Jun couldn’t make himself stop. His hair was messily tied half up, like he’d done it without looking in a mirror. There was a mole on his ear Gong Jun had never noticed before. He was wearing a familiar looking oversized long-sleeved shirt and, Gong Jun blinked, a familiar looking pair of sweatpants. There was a stain on the right knee where Gong Jun had dropped a pomegranate seed.

Zhehan saw where he was looking. “Oh, I hope it’s okay.” He tugged at the too-wide neck of the shirt. “I wasn’t—when I got here I mean—well I don’t wear much when I sleep and I thought that might be rude or a shock…” his voice trailed off.

“That’s fine,” Gong Jun managed to croak out. “You can wear whatever you want—I mean you can have—borrow my clothes.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Good.” Gong Jun echoed. He hadn’t managed to stop staring yet and Zhehan was starting to look nervous. “I think I’ll go take a shower,” he announced. That was a nice, normal thing to do.

Gong Jun shoved the comforter off him and stumbled his way to the bathroom before a thought occurred to him. He whirled around. “Did you? I mean would you like to? Take a shower?”

Zhehan’s eyes snapped up to Gong Jun’s. “Oh, uh, you can go first. It’s your house.”

Gong Jun blinked. “Right.” He walked into the bathroom and then walked right back out again and headed to the dresser. “Just grabbing clothes,” he announced loudly and winced. As if Zhehan needed a minute-by-minute narration of his life. He grabbed his phone on the way back to the bathroom. He had never missed a day of work before, but today seemed like a good time to start.

When he opened the bathroom door after his shower, Zhehan was still very undeniably present. On his bed. Wearing his clothes. Cat had returned to the bedroom and was sitting on his lap. Traitor.

Gong Jun cleared his throat.

Zhehan looked up and smiled tentatively at him. Gong Jun noted the way his hair was tucked behind his ear and decided to immediately un-note it.

“Do you want breakfast?”

“Yes, please.” Zhehan beamed at him. “I’ve been awake for hours.”

“Okay, great.” Gong Jun said. It was great. So great. Zhehan’s smile could power an entire building probably.

Zhehan followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen. “What do you usually eat for breakfast?” Gong Jun asked over his shoulder. “I have—” Zhehan was carrying Cat and making cooing noises at her.

He looked up at Gong Jun. “Hmm?” He was using one finger to scritch Cat under her chin.

“Food. I have. In the fridge. Different things.” Gong Jun hoped he looked marginally more intelligent than he sounded.

“Whatever’s easiest,” Zhehan said.

“Right. Okay.” Gong Jun opened the fridge. There was one egg on the top shelf, a bunch of grapes and a stray orange. “Why don’t I just—I’m going to go buy breakfast. Just wait here.”

Gong Jun closed the kitchen door on the sound of Zhehan’s protest and speed-walked through the house and out the front door. Outdoors was safer than indoors. Zhehan wouldn’t follow him outdoors. Probably.

He sped through the courtyard and turned onto the street, footsteps growing slower the further he got from the house until he finally came to a stop. He was cold, he realized. He hadn’t bothered to put on a coat and when he looked down, he saw he was still wearing his indoor slippers. The cool morning air on his face was enough to make him finally feel awake. He remembered, as he stared down at his slippered feet, that he was mad at Zhehan.

Zhehan, who had only been pretending to listen when Gong Jun said he didn’t have magic. Zhehan, who had smiled like the sun and happily expected Gong Jun to give him breakfast now, as if he hadn’t been lying to him for two weeks. Zhehan, who would soon find out he was wrong about Gong Jun. He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. Anger wasn’t as warming as he thought it would be.

If he walked a little further, he could buy breakfast at one of the food stalls on the main road. But he remembered that no coat meant no pockets and no pockets meant no phone or money. He would have to turn around and trudge back to the house, without anything to show for it.

He could just leave. It would take a while to get to Daidai’s apartment on foot, but he could do it. Maybe if he stayed away for long enough, Zhehan would be gone by the time he got back. Or maybe he would still be there and Gong Jun would have just given him more reasons to be disappointed.

He wiggled his toes in his slippers. He had never liked putting off unpleasant things. Besides, Cat liked to get an extra midmorning treat on days Gong Jun was home, and Zhehan wouldn’t know that. He should go home and feed Cat and order breakfast for himself and Zhehan could have some too, he supposed. He turned around to start his walk back.

When Gong Jun opened the door, he saw a familiar pair of sneakers in the entrance. The sound of laughter came from the back of the house. He walked into the kitchen. A bag full of enough cold medicine to last him a week was sitting on the counter, next to a giant container of congee with a stay warm charm plastered to the side.

“Ma was so worried since you never get sick.” He looked over at the table. Qiaoqiao was sitting there across from Zhehan, a wicked grin on her face. “I guess you had someone to take care of you though, huh? Your boyfriend has been telling me all about himself.”

Zhehan smiled at him nervously. He was sitting up very straight in his chair.

“You should have told me you were dating someone, Jun-ge,” Qiaoqiao continued. “I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this secret for, what was it again,” she glanced at Zhehan, “a whole year!”

Gong Jun sighed and crossed over to the cupboard and took down three bowls. “Quit it.” He opened the cutlery drawer to take out some spoons. “That was maybe the least believable lie you could’ve told,” he said to Zhehan.

Zhehan sagged back into his seat and sighed. “She noticed I was wearing your clothes.”

“I’m still waiting for an explanation for that, by the way,” Qiaoqiao said, eyes dancing. This was going to keep her going for at least a whole month, Gong Jun just knew it.

“He wasn’t wearing anything when he got here,” he explained, ladling congee into the bowls.

Qiaoqiao glanced at Zhehan again. “How nice for you.”

“I was wearing boxers,” Zhehan protested. The tips of his ears were tinged pink.

“She already knows about you,” Gong Jun said. He brought the bowls over to the table on a tray.

Qiaoqiao grabbed her bowl and a spoon. “I didn’t know you were at the sleeping over and staying for breakfast stage of your relationship, though.”

“What?” The rest of Zhehan’s face had started to turn the same colour as his ears.

“She thinks you’re my neighbour,” Gong Jun said. “You can explain. I’m hungry.”

Gong Jun ate his way through his bowl of congee while Zhehan talked. Zhehan was throwing little glances at him the whole time that Gong Jun chose not to notice. By the time he was done explaining, Gong Jun had started on a second bowl and Qiaoqiao’s questions had petered out while she tapped her fingers on the table thoughtfully.

“But how did you end up here?” she asked finally.

“I thought Gong Jun might know,” Zhehan said.

“I don’t.”

Zhehan wrapped his hands around his glass of water. “I think maybe it was you,” he said.

“It’s not possible,” Gong Jun said firmly. “I know you think I’ve got some sort of—” he waved his hand, “something, but I don’t.” He kept his eyes on his bowl while he talked. It was frustrating enough to have to explain again. He didn’t need to see Zhehan’s face turn to disappointment or, worse, pity.

“He really doesn’t have magic,” Qiaoqiao said.

Zhehan turned to her. “Do you?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, do some.”

Qiaoqiao tilted her head to one side and considered. Then she crooked her finger at the water in Zhehan’s glass and twitched it towards her. The water rose up out of the glass and into the air. Qiaoqiao spun her finger in a circle until it formed a waterspout. She stopped and snapped her fingers, and the water dropped back into Zhehan’s glass with a splash.

“Is that good enough?” she asked.

“Very impressive,” Zhehan said. “How did you do that?”

Qiaoqiao shrugged. “Water likes to move.”

“So you could move it because it was something water already likes to do?” Zhehan pressed.

“Yes?”

Zhehan nodded and turned to Gong Jun. “But you can’t.”

“No, I can’t.” Gong Jun tried to think of the best way to explain it. “It’s like you can talk to it, right?” he asked Qiaoqiao.

She wrinkled her nose. “Kind of? I know what it wants to do and I just have to convince it that it wants to do what I want it to do.”

Zhehan nodded again and snapped his fingers. The water rose up into the air again and spun around. It split up into individual droplets that raced in a circle above the table before dropping back into Zhehan’s glass.

“Mine doesn’t work like that,” Zhehan said. “I don’t know how to talk to it or persuade it to listen to me. I just imagine what I want it to do.” Zhehan looked at Gong Jun. “I think maybe your magic works the same as mine.”

Gong Jun shook his head. “No.”

“If that was true, wouldn’t we know by now anyway?” Qiaoqiao said. “It’s not like Jun-ge didn’t want to have magic. If he’d been sitting there thinking about how much he wanted, I don’t know, a flower to bloom, wouldn’t it still have worked even if his magic works like yours and not mine?”

“I don’t know why, if he was really trying, it wouldn’t have worked,” Zhehan admitted.

“I was trying.” Gong Jun’s voice was sharp. Zhehan had no idea how much he had tried.

Zhehan winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just—I’ve seen a lot of things that are hard to explain. That’s all. And you do have magic, Gong Jun, I can feel it.”

Gong Jun just shook his head again. Zhehan didn’t have an answer to Qiaoqiao’s question because he was wrong.

“Let me at least try and prove it to you?”

“Just try it, Jun-ge,” Qiaoqiao said. “It’s not like you’ll be any worse off if he’s wrong.”

“Fine.” If it would get Zhehan to finally stop asking, Gong Jun could try whatever it was he wanted. He took a deep breath and turned to Zhehan. “What do you want me to do?”

“Try and do what I just did. Lift the water up out of the glass. Don’t try to do it in whatever way people have taught you before. Just imagine it happening.”

Gong Jun had spent a year trying to make the water in his glass spin like a waterspout while his grandfather watched. He hadn’t managed it even once. Gong Jun could feel a headache starting behind his eyes, but Zhehan was still looking at him expectantly. Gong Jun sighed and stared at the glass. He tried very hard to imagine the water rising up out of it. Nothing happened. He could feel Zhehan and Qiaoqiao watching him. He tried again. Still nothing.

“Just relax,” Zhehan said quietly. “You have to really want it.”

Gong Jun glared at him. As if he didn’t want it. As if it wouldn’t have made his entire life easier to have had magic all this time just like everyone else. “I do want it. I just don’t have any magic, like I already told you.”

“You do,” Zhehan said. “You could probably turn me into a cat right now if you wanted.”

“Go turn into a cat then,” Gong Jun said irritably.

He blinked and Zhehan was gone. There was a small black cat with a white tummy sitting on his chair instead.

“Ge…” Qiaoqiao sounded impressed. “He was right.”

Zhehan-the-cat meowed and jumped up onto the table.

“Oh my god.” Gong Jun pushed his chair back. “Oh my god. I made him a cat.” Zhehan looked like he was smiling, which seemed like an entirely inappropriate reaction if you asked Gong Jun.

“How are you going to turn him back?” Qiaoqiao asked curiously.

“I don’t know!” Gong Jun felt a well of panic rising inside him. He would have to live with Zhehan forever probably. He couldn’t just abandon him after cursing him to live as a cat for the rest of his life. Would he have to give him cat food? Or would he still want people food? Gong Jun had a sudden vision of himself sitting down to dinner every night across the table from Zhehan and an elegantly arranged serving of tinned cat food on a plate.

“There must be a way to de-cattify him.”

“Well I don’t know what it is!” Gong Jun said. What would happen if he couldn’t figure out how to turn Zhehan back? Gong Jun had already whisked him away from his own world. His family, his friends, no one would ever know what happened to him. Cats didn’t live as long as people did. He had stolen Zhehan’s life from him.

“Ge,” Qiaoqiao snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Stop freaking out. What did you do to turn him into a cat?”

“I just—” Gong Jun looked down at Zhehan, still sitting on the table, watching him calmly. “I told him to be a cat.”

“Tell him to be a person again, then.”

Zhehan-the-cat meowed softly like he agreed.

“What if I make it worse?” He had already made one mistake today. What if he turned Zhehan back into a person but not the right one?

“Don’t think about that,” Qiaoqiao advised. “He said you just have to imagine what you want to happen, right? Do that and don’t think about anything else.”

Gong Jun took a deep breath and tried to concentrate. He closed his eyes and thought very hard of Zhehan-the-person. He thought of his eyes, and the way his voice sounded, and the way he threw his head back when he laughed. “Please turn back,” he said out loud. “Please, please, please become a person again. You were right, just please turn back.”

When he opened his eyes, Zhehan-the-cat was gone and Zhehan-the-person was perched on the table.

“I think,” Zhehan said, with a grin, “we need to work on your control.”

“Here, eat some more chocolate. Sugar is good for shock.” Qiaoqiao broke off another piece of her chocolate bar and handed it to Gong Jun. Qiaoqiao had taken one look at his face and hustled him off his chair to sit on the kitchen floor, because apparently that was good for shock too.

“I don’t like chocolate,” Gong Jun said but he took it all the same. “Why aren’t you shocked?” he asked her before taking a bite.

“It’s my young, flexible mind,” she answered cheerfully and patted his knee.

Zhehan laughed. He was none the worse for his brief period as a cat, Gong Jun noted.

Zhehan noticed him looking and smiled at him. “Are you feeling better now?”

“No,” Gong Jun said gloomily and took another bite of chocolate. The shock of turning Zhehan into a cat had receded enough to give his mind space for other thoughts. Such as how foolish it was to be almost thirty years old and not know you have magic.

“It’s not that uncommon,” Zhehan said, like he could guess what Gong Jun was thinking. “I told you last night. You’re not the first person I’ve met who didn’t know about their magic.”

Gong Jun doubted many of those other people had spent years accepting they didn’t have magic, only to find out they were wrong.

“Is it always this, uh, dramatic, when people find out?” Qiaoqiao asked.

“Sometimes,” Zhehan admitted. “It’s usually because of something they do by accident, but once they find out, they start remembering other things they couldn’t explain.” He looked at Gong Jun. “Can you remember anything like that? Something you wanted, maybe, and then it just happened, and you weren’t sure why.”

Gong Jun looked at the piece of chocolate in his hand. He used to like chocolate a lot when he was small, before one too many cavities made him stop. There was a convenience store next to his school that sold jumbo-sized bars. They were always selling out, but as long as Gong Jun crossed his fingers and wished extra hard, there’d be one left for him on his way home.

“That’s not—that can’t be magic.”

“Why not?” Zhehan’s voice was gentle.

“Because—” There were other things Gong Jun had wished for. New shoes, toy cars, snacks he wasn’t allowed to eat. He had wished for them all.

There were bigger things, too. Things like Yichen’s bicycle wheels turning into sunflowers, the math test that had disappeared before he had to write it, the trip to the dentist that had never happened. His heart started beating so loudly he could hear it.

Gong Jun stood up. “I need to—” He didn’t know what he needed to do. His hands were cold.

“Jun-ge?” Qiaoqiao sounded worried.

“I’ll be back in a second.”

He walked out of the room and up the stairs. When he got to the bedroom, he closed the door and sat on the floor by the bed. He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his forehead against them. It had been so long since he thought of the accident.

Thinking it was his fault for not wanting to go to the dentist was the silly kind of logic a kid would think up. It wasn’t supposed to be real.

He took a deep shuddering breath, trying to slow down his heart. If he hadn’t stopped making wishes back then, he could have done something much worse. His wishes had never come true in the way he expected them to. Maybe he had been using magic his whole life and just hadn’t realized it. He thought of his father again, slumped in the driver’s seat, all because Gong Jun wanted to avoid a trip to the dentist.

He pressed his hands together. They were still so cold. He could still hurt someone by accident, even now. In just one day, he had yanked Zhehan out of his world and turned him into a cat. He hadn’t meant to do that. He hadn’t even made a wish that time. What use was magic that was so unpredictable? How could he walk around never knowing what mistake he might make next? He needed to learn how to control it.

That thought calmed him down. He just needed to learn control. He was good at learning how to do what he needed. He took another deep breath. His heart finally started to slow.

He was still on the floor half an hour later when there was a knock on the door, before Qiaoqiao opened it. She sat next to him.

“You’re very busy up here,” she said, nudging his shoulder.

Gong Jun sighed. “Why are you still here?”

“Am I supposed to just leave?”

“You have to open the shop,” Gong Jun said. “You can’t just close for the day because you feel like it.”

Qiaoqiao inspected her nails. “Can I close for the day if I’m worried about my beloved cousin?”

“No.” He glanced at Qiaoqiao. He must have looked terrible if she was worried.

Qiaoqiao nudged his shoulder again. “You remembered something,” she said, “right?”

Gong Jun opened his mouth and then closed it. If he talked about it, his hands would start feeling cold again.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said quickly, sneaking a peek at his face. “But you did remember something?”

Gong Jun nodded.

“Okay.” She hesitated. “I don’t know what the problem is, but I think he can help. He was right about you having magic and he said he’s met other people like you.

“I’ll go open the shop if you agree to talk to him,” she added when he didn’t say anything. “Or I can stay if you want company. But you can’t hide in here forever.”

Qiaoqiao was right, even if he didn’t want to admit it. “You don’t have to stay,” Gong Jun said.

Qiaoqiao looked at him closely. “Are you sure?”

“Do I look that bad?” Gong Jun smiled.

“You look better than before,” Qiaoqiao said, “but—”

“I’ll be fine,” Gong Jun said evenly. “And you do have to open the shop.” He stood up.

“He’s worried about you,” Qiaoqiao said, getting to her feet too. “I don’t think he expected you to react the way you did.”

That wasn’t surprising. Gong Jun hadn’t expected his reaction either.

He followed Qiaoqiao down the stairs. Zhehan was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table. He stood up when Gong Jun walked in.

“Are you okay?” he asked. Qiaoqiao was right. Zhehan did look worried.

“I’ll be fine,” Gong Jun said again, looking at Zhehan. He meant it. He had a plan.

Qiaoqiao picked up her bag from the table. “I’m leaving, because my boss is terrible and makes me work all the time while he sits at home.”

Gong Jun smiled so Qiaoqiao would see he hadn’t lied about being fine.

“Be nice to him,” she said, poking Zhehan’s shoulder, before she left.

Gong Jun waited until he heard the sound of the front door closing before he sat down at the table. “What happens now?”

Zhehan sat down too. “What do you mean?”

“How are you going to get back to your own world?”

Zhehan leaned back in his chair. “Travelling across universes isn’t that simple,” he explained. “I could manage to build a gate between our worlds with help, but not on my own. But I think you could send me back.”

“No,” Gong Jun said immediately. He shook his head. He wasn’t going to use magic on another person, not until he knew what he was doing. There were too many ways it could go wrong. “I don’t know how. I could send you to the wrong place.”

“I thought about that,” Zhehan said slowly, “but it doesn’t seem likely. Our houses are already tied together. Even if your intentions aren’t clear enough, I’ll probably end up in the right place.”

‘Probably’ wasn’t good enough. Gong Jun twisted his mouth to the side.

“We can try something smaller first,” Zhehan said, watching his face.

“What happens if something goes wrong again? I wasn’t trying to turn you into a cat, but it still happened.”

“I’ll be here to help you. I can undo anything you do by accident.”

That wasn’t reassuring enough, but Gong Jun didn’t have much choice. He wanted to learn how to control his magic, and he couldn’t do that if he didn’t use it.

Gong Jun took a breath. “Okay. What would something smaller be? Moving the water in the cup again?”

“It doesn’t have to be that,” Zhehan said. “We can practice moving something small around the house.”

Gong Jun thought for a moment, then went to the fridge and opened the door, pulling a grape off the bunch that was on the middle shelf. He couldn’t think of how a grape could hurt someone; it didn’t even have any sharp edges. “Is this small enough?”

“It’s definitely small enough.” Zhehan smiled.

Gong Jun sat back down and put the grape on the table. “I have one more question. What happens if I eventually send you back? How can I learn how to control my magic without you?”

“I won’t just abandon you,” Zhehan assured him, still smiling. “I can help you find a teacher, a good one.”

Gong Jun’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Abandon seemed like a strong word. Gong Jun wasn’t worried about being abandoned, he’d prefer it if Zhehan taught him himself, just so he didn’t have to wait to find a teacher, but it was good to know Zhehan would help. “Okay,” he said. “So what do I do now?”

Zhehan talked Gong Jun through sending the grape from one end of the table to the other. On his third try, he did it.

“See? You can do it.”

“No. I meant to send it there.” Gong Jun pointed to a spot on the table two inches to the right of where the grape was sitting.

Zhehan gaped at him. “That’s basically the same thing.”

“And what would ‘basically the same thing’ be in the case where I send you slightly to the left of the right universe?” Gong Jun felt a sharp stab of annoyance. It was all very well for Zhehan to take risks on his own behalf, but what if Gong Jun accidentally sent him somewhere dangerous?

Zhehan opened his mouth and closed it again. “Okay, let’s try it again.”

Gong Jun practiced moving the grape over and over and over again. Sometimes it didn’t work, sometimes it did. Zhehan kept patiently moving it back to its original position on the table.

When he succeeded at sending it to exactly the right spot five times in a row, he finally stopped. “Okay,” he said. “What should I try next?”

“Let’s try sending it somewhere you can’t see. You can pick a spot in one of the other rooms to send it to.” Zhehan moved the grape to the center of the table. “You can’t see where you’re moving it to, so you need to imagine it clearly. You can close your eyes if it helps.

“You’re doing well, by the way,” he added with a smile.

Gong Jun found himself smiling back. It was easier than he thought it would be, once he’d tried a few times and nothing unexpected unhappened. He could shuffle his worries to the back of his head and focus.

He closed his eyes and imagined the grape appearing on the coffee table in the living room. When he opened them again, the grape was gone. “Did it work?”

“Only one way to find out,” Zhehan said, grinning.

Gong Jun pushed his chair back and stood up. Everything wobbled for a moment and when he could see again, the kitchen had started spinning around him. He fumbled for the back of his chair and sank back down, blinking. The floor had gone wobbly too, when he wasn’t paying attention.

“Gong Jun?”

Gong Jun tried to look at Zhehan, but he kept moving back and forth. He closed his eyes. He could still feel the kitchen moving in unexpected ways, but at least he couldn’t see it anymore. He heard the scrape of a chair next to him, and felt an arm wrap around his shoulders.

“What’s happening?” Gong Jun asked.

“You’re dizzy. It’s my fault. I should have realized.”

Gong Jun felt something being pressed to his lips. “It’s water,” Zhehan said softly. Gong Jun opened his mouth and drank slowly. He could feel that he was leaning into Zhehan’s side, but he couldn’t quite figure out how to stop.

“You just spent hours doing advanced magic for the first time. Of course you’re exhausted.”

Now that Zhehan said it, Gong Jun was suddenly aware of how tired he was. His body was getting heavier and heavier. He sagged a little further in his chair.

“You need rest.” Zhehan’s voice grew quieter. “You probably didn’t get much sleep last night.”

Zhehan said something else but Gong Jun wasn’t sure what exactly. He couldn’t hear anything through the thick layer of cotton wrapped around his ears. When Zhehan squeezed his shoulders, Gong Jun let himself lean even more against his side. He drifted off to the feeling of Zhehan’s thigh pressed up warm against his own.

When Gong Jun woke up, it was dark. He was in bed, he realized, after he spent a few moments blinking at the ceiling. The blanket was tucked up to his chin. The last thing he remembered was sitting at the kitchen table. The world seemed to have stopped spinning around him while he slept, so that was nice. Someone had put his phone on the bedside table. He picked it up. It was nearly 9pm.

He pushed the blanket down and swung his legs out of bed. The house felt strangely quiet after everything that had happened that day. He walked down the stairs and saw a light coming from the open living room door.

Zhehan was sitting sideways on the sofa with his legs stretched out in front of him. He was reading a book by the light of the lamp on the side table. When he saw Gong Jun, he dropped the book on the coffee table.

“How are you feeling? Does your head hurt? Are you hungry?”

Gong Jun settled on the last question as the easiest. “I’m starving.”

Zhehan waited until they were both sitting at the kitchen table with two bowls of the congee from that morning before he asked again. “How are you feeling?”

Gong Jun swallowed his spoonful of congee before he answered. It settled warm in his stomach. “I’m not dizzy anymore.”

“Good.” Zhehan fiddled with his spoon.

“When can we practice again?” He didn’t want to waste any time.

“Let’s see how you feel tomorrow. Sorry,” Zhehan smiled, “I can’t have you exhausting yourself on my watch.”

Gong Jun couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a moment, he gave up and focused back on his food. Soon, he heard the clink of Zhehan’s spoon against his bowl.

By the time he was done eating, Gong Jun was ready to fall back into bed again. Zhehan looked at him sympathetically. “Dishes tomorrow,” he said. “You need more sleep.”

Gong Jun wanted to protest but Zhehan took his bowl away from him and put it in the sink. The sink was so far away and not in the direction of his bed. Gong Jun couldn’t possibly make it all the way over there.

“Can you get upstairs by yourself?”

“Yes,” Gong Jun said confidently. He got up and immediately sat back down again. His legs had turned into jelly while he wasn’t looking.

Zhehan bit back a smile. “Come on, I’ll help you.”

Gong Jun let Zhehan pull him to his feet and steer him carefully out of the kitchen and up the stairs. His hands were warm. Zhehan helped him into the bathroom and left him there when he was sure Gong Jun could stand and walk enough on his own that he wouldn’t fall over. Gong Jun heard Zhehan moving around outside while he brushed his teeth.

When Gong Jun emerged from the bathroom, Zhehan helped him into bed. Gong Jun sank back into the mattress. The few minutes he’d spent standing on his own had made his legs feel like jelly again.

“Goodnight!” Zhehan said.

“Wait.” Gong Jun grabbed the sleeve of his shirt as Zhehan started to turn away and head for the door. “Where are you going to sleep?”

“The sofa downstairs.”

Gong Jun thought of Zhehan sitting on the sofa earlier. His feet had been almost touching the other end and he hadn’t even been lying down. “It’s too small.”

“It’ll be fine,” Zhehan assured him, pulling Gong Jun’s hand off his sleeve. “There isn’t anywhere else to sleep, anyway.”

That wasn’t technically true. “You can sleep here, I guess.”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

Gong Jun opened his mouth to say it wouldn’t bother him and then closed it. Lying required more energy than he had at the moment. “Look, just sleep here so I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and feel bad about you falling off the sofa on top of feeling bad about pulling you over here in the first place.”

When Zhehan opened his mouth to argue, Gong Jun turned over and closed his eyes. Eventually, he heard Zhehan cross over to the other side of the bed and get in. He let his shoulders drop. Now he could sleep in peace.

He woke up in the morning to an arm slung over his waist. Zhehan was wrapped around him. Gong Jun froze. Zhehan’s face was pressed against Gong Jun’s back and their ankles were tangled together. Gong Jun could feel the rise and fall of his chest. He couldn’t remember the last time he had woken up like this, with another person in his space. He shifted a little and Zhehan tightened his arm immediately, making a disgruntled noise. Gong Jun stopped moving. Zhehan was so warm. Gong Jun had wondered before if he ran hot or cold, when finding out hadn’t seemed like a real possibility, when Zhehan was only a man in his mirror.

Gong Jun waited until Zhehan seemed like he had fallen back asleep, then carefully disentangled their ankles and started to slowly lift the hand Zhehan had placed on his stomach.

“Oh shit, sorry sorry sorry.” The warmth pressed against Gong Jun’s back disappeared. He sat up and turned around to see Zhehan scrambling his way to the furthest edge of the bed.

“Sorry,” Zhehan said. His hair on one side was stuck to the side of his face. “People tell me I get clingy when I’m asleep.” He stumbled backwards off the bed. “I’ll get up. I should take a shower. You go back to sleep.” He practically ran to the bathroom and then whirled around in the doorway. “Wait, will that be worse? Will the noise keep you awake?”

“Uh, no?”

“Okay.” Zhehan nodded once and then turned on his heel and closed the bathroom door behind him.

Gong Jun lay back down again. A bit of hair had been sticking up over Zhehan’s forehead. It had bounced with every step he took. Gong Jun pulled the comforter up to cover his face. It was too early for this.

When Gong Jun woke again, the bathroom door was open. He could hear the faint noise of the sink downstairs. When he walked into the kitchen, Zhehan was vigorously scrubbing a bowl with his sleeves rolled up. There was water splashed around the edges of the sink and a large wet spot on the front of Zhehan’s shirt.

“I thought I should make breakfast for you,” Zhehan said when he looked back and saw Gong Jun watching him, “but then I remembered that there’s nothing in the fridge, so I thought I should buy breakfast, but then I remembered I don’t have any money, so then I thought at least I should do the dishes.”

Gong Jun walked over and took the sponge and bowl from Zhehan’s hands. He noticed Zhehan carefully moved his fingers so he didn’t touch Gong Jun accidentally.

“Oh no, you don’t have to do that…” Zhehan’s voice trailed off.

“I’m the reason you’re here,” Gong Jun said. “If anything, I should be making it up to you.” He rinsed off the bowl and put it in the drying rack with the rest of the dishes Zhehan had already cleaned.

“It’s still your house. And I’ve already borrowed your clothes, and woken you up early.”

“It’s not my house,” Gong Jun reminded him. He dried his hands and looked at Zhehan. “When can we practice magic again?”

“How are you feeling?”

“A bit tired still,” Gong Jun admitted, “but a lot better than yesterday.”

“Hmm.” Zhehan looked at him assessingly. “Let’s wait and see how you’re feeling later today.”

“Okay.” Gong Jun wanted to start right now. The sooner they started, the sooner he could stop wondering what he might do by mistake.

He opened a cupboard to take down a mug and then stopped. He closed the cupboard and opened it again.

“What’s wrong?” Zhehan asked.

Gong Jun opened another cupboard, then another. Everything was exactly where he expected it to be, sitting very solidly in its place. Nothing was wavering about like it wasn’t quite sure it belonged there, not even the tins of cat food which had flickered worse than anything else in the kitchen.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said, turning to Zhehan. His heart was starting to thump wildly in his chest. “Everything in the kitchen is always going back and forth between your world and mine.”

“Let me try something.” Zhehan closed his eyes. He stood there silently for what felt like ages, barely moving.

Gong Jun waited impatiently. His heart hadn’t slowed down yet. He was just about to ask what Zhehan was doing when he opened his eyes again.

“I can’t feel anything.”

“Feel what?”

“There should be a pathway,” Zhehan explained. “That’s how things from your world could travel to mine. I told you I tried to feel out a path between our worlds before, right? When I was in my world? But there was nothing there, which is why I could never send anything to you unless it came from your world in the first place. It feels the same here.”

Gong Jun stared at him. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure.” Zhehan tilted his head to the side thoughtfully. “I tried it yesterday too, when I first got here, but I didn’t feel anything then either. I thought it was just because I’m not familiar with the types of magic in your world. But maybe that’s not it.”

“What is it, then?” There was a cold, creeping feeling travelling up his spine.

“Maybe when you pulled me over here, that broke something?” Zhehan mused. Gong Jun was starting to feel sick. So it was definitely his fault. “It’s like you pulled a door that was supposed to be pushed. I don’t think the connection was meant to work both ways.” He sounded entirely too calm about it.

“But how are you supposed to get back?” Zhehan had a dog, and friends, and a mother. What if he never saw them again?

“Someone will realize I’m missing eventually. A friend was supposed to visit me tomorrow anyway,” Zhehan said in the same thoughtful tone of voice, like he was considering an interesting problem that had nothing to do with him. “I’ve left lots of notes, so they can piece things together. And we can keep trying to figure something out here. When Yichen shows up again, we can always ask him. He must know something.”

Gong Jun thought of the prospect of getting any coherent information from Yichen. If he ever appeared again in the first place. Maybe this had all been a trick to get Gong Jun to adopt his cat.

“Just trust me,” Zhehan said. “I’ve been in much worse situations than this one.”

“Right.” Gong Jun had not, personally, been in worse situations than this one.

“It’ll really be fine,” Zhehan said. “You’ll see.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the counter. “Should we look through Yichen’s workshop for clues? Or do you have to go to work?”

“I can be late, or I can not go in today at all,” Gong Jun said, trying to ignore the dread that was curling in his stomach still. Arranging his own schedule was one of the perks of being the boss. “But I’ve already looked through his workshop.”

“It might be worth a second look,” Zhehan said, “but we can save it for later if you’ve already checked.” He leaned back a little further. “If you’re still tired, you can say no, but could we go to the shop?”

“You want to go to work with me?”

“I want to see it!” Zhehan grinned. “I told you I’m a researcher, and I’ve never been to this world before. I want to know how magic is sold here.”

“Are you sure? It’s not very interesting.” Gong Jun had been planning to sort through some of the more ominous boxes in the backroom today.

“It’ll be interesting to me,” Zhehan assured him.

Gong Jun wasn’t convinced, but Zhehan seemed to be. He scanned him over quickly. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. “Are you going to wear the same thing every day you’re here?”

Zhehan tugged at the hem of his sweatshirt. “I didn’t want to borrow anything without asking. Again.”

Gong Jun tried to calm his nerves enough to smile reassuringly. He didn’t want Zhehan to think he had to be careful around him. “Socks and underwear are in the second dresser drawer from the top, pants are in the third drawer and there’s shirts hanging in the wardrobe.” He turned away to fill up the kettle and switched it on. “You can borrow whatever you want.”

Gong Jun wasn’t sure if it was just the fact that he had turned Zhehan into a cat, but twenty minutes later, he had to admit there was something cat-like about the way his hands peeked out of the sleeves of Gong Jun’s too-big sweater.

Zhehan was looking around the street with interest and swinging a thermos of honey water in one hand. He had left a healthy distance between them as they walked. After a few minutes of walking in silence, he asked, “Is Shanghai not a big city here?”

“It’s one of the biggest.”

“Oh. But you don’t have any high-rises?”

“High-rises?”

Zhehan raised his hand up high above his head. “The really tall buildings.”

Gong Jun looked at the buildings around them. The tallest one soared above them at ten stories. “If you go further into the city center there are taller ones, maybe fifteen stories?”

“Huh.”

Gong Jun glanced at him. “What’s it like in your world?”

“Bigger, a lot more tall buildings. Houses like yours are much more rare. I got lucky renting that place.

“It’s not the biggest, though,” Zhehan added. “There’s another world with a Shanghai that has a building that’s 128 stories tall, but they don’t have any magic.”

Gong Jun tried to visualize what a building with 128 floors would look like. He couldn’t imagine why any building that tall needed to exist.

Zhehan kept looking around at everything while they walked, like he’d never seen a city street before. When they arrived at the shop, Qiaoqiao was already inside, waving to them from the window. Gong Jun reached out to grab the handle just as Zhehan did the same. Zhehan yanked his hand back.

Gong Jun held the door open for him.

“Still here, I see,” Qiaoqiao said when they walked in.

“He’s stuck here,” Gong Jun said.

“Just for now,” Zhehan added. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Who’s worried?” Qiaoqiao said. “You can help me clean since you’re here.”

“He’s not here to do your job for you!” Gong Jun protested. He turned to Zhehan. “You don’t have to do anything.”

“I’m great at cleaning,” Zhehan said confidently. “And this way I can look around the whole shop.”

“Didn’t you want to see what kind of magic we sell?” Gong Jun asked.

“Cleaning is a great way to see everything,” Zhehan assured him.

Gong Jun doubted that, but if Zhehan wanted to clean, Gong Jun wouldn’t stop him.

Zhehan tackled cleaning the shop with more enthusiasm than Gong Jun had ever felt for any kind of work. After the first hour, during which Gong Jun could practically hear the dust being knocked to the ground, Qiaoqiao retreated from the back shelves and settled at her place at the worktable in the front.

“You should keep him around,” she whispered to Gong Jun as she walked past. “I’ll never have to clean anything again.”

After another hour, Zhehan walked past him on his way to the backroom with a bucket and a mop. Gong Jun heard the sound of water sloshing violently in the bucket. He half rose out of his seat and then sat back down again. It was just mopping. How badly could it go? At worst, the floor would get wetter than expected. He focused back on his work.

Gong Jun didn’t notice the bubbles at first, not until he got off the stool to get another box from the backroom and felt something damp against his jeans. He looked down. The floor was covered in a thick layer of soap bubbles, reaching halfway up his shins. They were pouring out of the backroom.

He waded through them towards the door. “Zhehan?” he called out. When he poked his head through the open doorway, he saw Zhehan, standing on the top step of a step stool and holding a box up above his head. There were stray bubbles floating through the air. Gong Jun watched as one settled into Zhehan’s hair.

“Why are there so many?” Zhehan asked him frantically. “I just put in a normal amount of the cleaning powder and then it was like the room exploded with bubbles.” He leaned over and slid his box onto a high shelf. “I tried to send them away, but more just keep appearing.”

“What’s a normal amount exactly?” Gong Jun asked. He stepped further into the room and looked into the bucket. There was so much foam spilling out over the top that he couldn’t tell how much water was left.

“Umm, I don’t know. Maybe a handful? Or two?”

“Two handfuls?” Gong Jun used Blue Magic Cleaning Bubbles at home. He knew exactly what the directions said.

“The floor was dirty,” Zhehan said defensively.

Gong Jun looked up at him and saw that more bubbles had settled in his hair. It looked like Zhehan was wearing a little hat. He tried not to laugh, but when Zhehan started trying to shoo the bubbles creeping up his legs away from him with just his hands, he couldn’t help it. He covered his face with his hands, laughter spilling out of his mouth.

“And what’s so funny?”

Gong Jun looked through his fingers to see Zhehan looking at him accusingly, his hands on his hips. He started laughing again. After a moment, he heard Zhehan join in.

When Qiaoqiao stuck her head through the doorway, they were both still laughing. “What on earth are you two doing?” she asked. She raised her hand and stabbed the air with one finger. The bubbles started to pop, one after another.

“Oh,” Zhehan said, between laughs, “I didn’t think of popping them.”

“He used two handfuls of cleaning powder,” Gong Jun explained, when he could speak again.

“Oh my god. You only need one spoonful. A tiny spoonful.” Qiaoqiao raised her hand again and swept it slowly through the air.

Gong Jun felt a current of warm air sweep over him, drying out his jeans and shoes. He looked over at Zhehan and saw the wet patches on his clothes disappearing too. He stepped over and held out his hand. “Da-ge, maybe you should take a break from cleaning.”

Zhehan looked at his outstretched hand. The smile on his face grew wider. He put his hand in Gong Jun’s and let himself be helped down off the stool. “What do you suggest?”

“Come help me sort,” Gong Jun said. “You wanted to see what kind of magic we sell, right?”

Sorting through the boxes of stray inventory was more fun with two people. Zhehan asked questions and made little comments whenever he saw something he didn’t understand or thought was funny. The work went faster, too. When Zhehan went into the backroom to get another box, Gong Jun looked up and saw Qiaoqiao watching him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s nice you’re getting along. Convenient.”

Gong Jun ignored her smirk and focused on putting the charmed mirrors they’d found into a basket. It was nice. There were worse people to accidentally summon to your house than Zhang Zhehan.

“So I was thinking,” Zhehan said. He was fitting the groceries Gong Jun handed him haphazardly into the fridge. “I know you want to practice magic again, but it would be better to rest more today and practice tomorrow.”

Gong Jun didn’t like the thought of waiting any more than he had to, but after a day of work, he felt more tired than before. It didn’t seem likely something unexpected would happen if they waited another day, and Zhehan could fix it if something did happen. “Okay.”

He watched as Zhehan balanced a block of tofu on top of a bag of mushrooms and made a mental note to rearrange everything when he wasn’t looking. “Do you want to look through Yichen’s workshop instead?”

“After dinner,” Zhehan suggested.

“After dinner,” Gong Jun agreed. He had stocked up on chili peppers especially.

Dinner was something Zhehan insisted on helping with too, so Gong Jun handed him an onion and set him to peeling and slicing it. After a few minutes, he looked over and saw Zhehan was still struggling to get the peel off with his fingers.

“Like this,” he said. He took the onion from Zhehan and showed him how to ease the peel off with his knife. He handed the peeled onion back and tried not to wince at the way Zhehan started slicing it.

“I’m sorry, by the way,” Zhehan said after he had massacred half an onion.

Gong Jun looked up at him. “About what?”

“For lying to you, when I was testing you,” Zhehan said.

Gong Jun looked back down at his cutting board. Zhehan had tried to tell him without lying. He had brought it up three times before that day. And Gong Jun had brushed him off every single time. More than brushed him off, Gong Jun admitted to himself.

“I didn’t give you a choice.” Gong Jun went back to slicing the garlic. “You tried to tell me. Lots of times. I was the one who didn’t listen.”

Gong Jun could see Zhehan looking at him from the corner of his eye. “Qiaoqiao told me, while you were sleeping yesterday, she said that you had a good reason for not believing me.”

“Yeah.” Gong Jun held his knife still against the cutting board.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Zhehan said. He finished slicing the first onion and picked up the second. Gong Jun watched him start peeling it the way he had shown him.

“Everyone knows, anyway.” He put his knife down and swept the garlic into a small bowl. “My parents, both of them, they’re kind of, not famous exactly, but everyone knows who they are. They both work with plants.” Gong Jun grabbed a spoon and started peeling the ginger. “No one could believe it when I didn’t have magic. You know that trick Qiaoqiao showed you yesterday? With the water spinning? I spent a year trying to do just that, every single day.” He put down the spoon and grabbed his knife again. The ginger made a satisfying crisp noise when he cut it. “It took years for everyone to accept I didn’t have any magic. Sometimes people still ask me, like I just haven’t tried enough or I’m trying to be difficult or something.”

Zhehan had stopped slicing his onion next to him. “So when I—I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“I didn’t tell you,” Gong Jun said. “Anyway, I’m sorry too. For yanking you over here and not being able to send you back.”

“Don’t be,” Zhehan said, smiling at him. “This is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

The fried noodles Gong Jun made were nothing special, but Zhehan ate them enthusiastically. It was nicer than he had expected, eating dinner together like this, with Cat alternating between wandering under the table to wind around their legs and retreating to sit by her food bowl and look at them expectantly. Zhehan told Gong Jun stories about the places he’d been while they ate. Gong Jun learned about worlds where elephants were pink and dragons were real. He learned that in world 7D, there was a lake where the water was so clear, you could see all the way down to the bottom. Mostly, he learned that Zhehan had been to more places and done more things than Gong Jun had ever thought possible. Zhehan kept up his steady stream of chatter after dinner, while they looked through Yichen’s workshop. He had spent three months in world 6A cataloguing rare plants. In world 3F, he had infiltrated a witch’s council that had been trying to illegally harvest turtle shells.

Hardly anything had happened in Gong Jun’s life in comparison. Not that that stopped Zhehan from asking him lots of questions.

It was much easier to talk like this than it had been to talk through the mirror. Gong Jun told him about growing up in a house that was basically an apothecary. He told him about memorizing the names of every plant in his family’s greenhouse and garden. Zhehan kept asking questions, just like he had that afternoon in the shop, even though most of Gong Jun’s stories had nothing to do with magic.

“There really isn’t anything here,” Zhehan said, when they’d finally looked through every cupboard and flipped through every notebook.

“But he must have kept notes somewhere, right?” Gong Jun said. “If he really did something to the house.”

Zhehan bit his lip. “Would he have taken them with him?”

“For what?”

Zhehan leaned back against a cupboard. There were notebooks fanned out on the floor around him. “If we just knew where he was going…”

“All I know is that he wanted to keep it a secret.”

“Is there really no one we can ask?”

Gong Jun pulled his phone out and thought. “I don’t really know who his friends are anymore. Someone did tell me he was dating someone. I can message and ask if she knows anything else.” He spun his phone in his hand. “I can ask Daidai again, too. He knows everybody.”

“Okay.” Zhehan yawned, mouth stretching wide.

Gong Jun checked the time on his phone. “Come on,” he said, standing up, “it’s late.”

When he saw Zhehan start to do the calculus of figuring out how to get up from the floor, he reached out his hand. Zhehan hesitated a moment, then he grabbed it.

There wasn’t any argument this time about where Zhehan would sleep. He followed Gong Jun into the bedroom and quietly took the pyjamas Gong Jun handed him. It wasn’t until Gong Jun had started to fall asleep that he heard Zhehan’s voice from his side of the bed.

“It’s a basketball injury,” Zhehan said, jolting Gong Jun awake again.

“A what?”

“My knee. I hurt it while I was playing basketball. It’s not a big deal, but I saw you noticed it.”

“Oh.” Gong Jun had noticed the cautious way Zhehan had stepped down from the stepstool that morning, and the way he got up from his seat behind the counter every once in a while to stretch his legs.

“It’s really fine most of the time.”

Gong Jun turned to look at Zhehan in the dark. Zhehan was turned away from him. He couldn’t see much more than the dark shadow of his hair against the pillow. “What’s basketball?” he asked.

“Oh my god,” Zhehan said after a pause. He turned over to face Gong Jun. “You don’t have basketball.” He sounded delighted. “It’s um, a game? There’s a ball and you have to try and get it into a hoop. I’ll show you sometime.”

“Okay,” Gong Jun agreed. He yawned. “Maybe when I’m awake.”

Zhehan laughed. “Goodnight, Gong Jun.”

Gong Jun tried to say goodnight back, but he wasn’t sure if he managed it before sleep pulled him under again.

Lihua didn’t know anything more about Yichen, it turned out. Gong Jun messaged her first thing in the morning.

“We’ll just have to ask Daidai,” he said to Cat. Cat was sitting on his lap, purring contentedly. Gong Jun had stumbled downstairs early enough that morning that her automatic feeder hadn’t dispensed her food yet, so he’d fed her himself. He tapped out a message to Daidai and then put his phone down on the table and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. Daidai wouldn’t reply for hours. He wasn’t a morning person. Gong Jun wasn’t a morning person either, but if he had stayed in bed until Zhehan woke up, they would have had another awkward morning of apologies when Zhehan realized he’d started spooning Gong Jun in his sleep again.

“It’s really not a big deal,” he said out loud to Cat, stroking her fur. Zhehan probably got cold in his sleep, somehow, even though he ran warm. Gong Jun was a convenient heat source. Cat was a convenient heat source, too, warming up his lap. His hand moved slower and slower through her fur until he stopped. He was still dozing off in his chair when he heard Zhehan’s voice.

“Gong Jun?”

Gong Jun opened his eyes and saw Zhehan standing in the doorway. “Good morning.” Zhehan had taken the time to neaten up his hair before he came downstairs. It was tied half back just like the day he had arrived.

“Did I wake you up again?”

“No,” Gong Jun said, which wasn’t a lie, because he’d been so comfortable with Zhehan pressed up warm against his back that Cat had had to bat his face five times before he’d reluctantly opened his eyes. “I messaged Lihua, by the way.”

“Oh, what did she say?” Zhehan poured some water from the still-warm kettle into a mug and sat down across from Gong Jun.

“She doesn’t know anything more than what she already told me. I messaged Daidai too but he hasn’t replied yet.”

“That’s too bad.” Zhehan took a sip of his water. He flicked his eyes up to look at Gong Jun and then flicked them down again. “Are you sure I didn’t wake you up? It’s just I was on your pillow when I woke up.”

“You must have moved after I got up,” Gong Jun said. “Cat woke me up to feed her.”

“Oh.” Zhehan took another sip of his water. “But you’d tell me if I was bothering you, right?”

“You’re not bothering me,” Gong Jun said. He looked right at Zhehan when he said it, so Zhehan could see that he meant it.

Zhehan’s mouth curled up a little at the corners. “Do you work today?”

“Not until the afternoon.” Gong Jun had arranged his schedule to work as few mornings as possible. That’s what Qiaoqiao was for.

“Do you want to practice magic this morning, then?” Zhehan asked.

Gong Jun looked down at his hands, still buried in Cat’s fur. He hadn’t tried to do anything since that first day. He couldn’t do anything to send Zhehan back but he still needed to learn control.

“Are we moving grapes again today?”

“Not that,” Zhehan said quickly. “Something fun.”

“Like what?”

Zhehan’s idea of fun involved an unexpected amount of furniture rearrangement. When the sofa had been pushed back against the wall and the coffee table moved to the side, Zhehan went to stand in the middle of the room.

“Come over here,” he said, holding out his hands.

Gong Jun stepped over and put his hands in Zhehan’s. “Why do we need to hold hands?”

“It’s easier if I show you first, so you can see what it feels like.”

“See what what feels like? Oh—” Gong Jun looked down. His feet were dangling in midair and Zhehan was floating there with him. “How did you do that?”

“I’ll show you.” Zhehan tugged on his hands. They floated back down to the floor. “It’s the same as anything else, you just have to focus your intentions.”

“What happens if they’re not focused?” Gong Jun asked. “I’m not going to use magic on you when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Gong Jun could already see all the ways this could go wrong. Zhehan could smack his head against the ceiling if Gong Jun sent him up too quickly, or he could lose control halfway through and drop Zhehan to the floor.

“You’re not using it on me, you’re using it on yourself,” Zhehan said. “And I can fix anything you do by accident.”

“What if you can’t fix it in time?” Gong Jun didn’t understand how Zhehan could be so calm.

Zhehan smiled. “What do you think you might do that I can’t fix?” he asked.

“I could get stuck up high, or I could fall, and if I bring you with me, then you’ll fall too.”

Zhehan tilted his head to the side and thought. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Try pulling on my hands now. No magic, just pull.”

Gong Jun tugged Zhehan towards himself. He stayed exactly where he was. Gong Jun stepped back and tugged a little harder. Zhehan still didn’t move.

“How are you doing that?” Gong Jun asked.

“I stuck my feet to the ground,” Zhehan said, grinning. “As long as you’re holding my hands, you won’t be able to go too far, and you won’t have to worry about hurting me either.”

There could still be other problems Gong Jun hadn’t identified yet. He needed more time to think through all the possibilities.

Zhehan squeezed his hands. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said. “Okay?”

Gong Jun looked down at their hands. He could feel the calluses on Zhehan’s palms. His hands felt warm and steady. He looked back up at Zhehan, waiting patiently. “Okay.”

Gong Jun spent the next hour trying to send himself up into the air with varying degrees of success, while Zhehan gave him instructions. He kept a firm grip on Gong Jun’s hands, not that it was really necessary. Gong Jun could barely manage to hover a centimetre off the floor.

“Why isn’t it working,” he asked finally, frustration making his voice sharp.

“You just need practice,” Zhehan said. His voice was so calm that Gong Jun found some of his own annoyance evaporating just at the sound. “You haven’t used your magic in so long that it’s just a bit harder for you, that’s all.”

“Moving the grape was easier than this.”

“I think maybe it’s easier for you if you’re feeling a strong emotion,” Zhehan said. “You—a lot happened that day.”

“But what about before that?” Gong Jun asked again. “When you were testing me and I didn’t know? It worked then, too.”

“I’m not sure, but I think it was because you thought it wasn’t you. You believed me that it would work and you thought it was the house doing it, so that was fine.

“It’s nothing we can’t fix,” Zhehan added when he saw the unhappy frown on Gong Jun’s face. He let go of Gong Jun’s hands. “Why don’t we stop for now? You have to work.”

Zhehan turned to move the coffee table back into place, and Gong Jun wiped his hands on his jeans before following to help. They were sweaty from holding Zhehan’s for so long. If Zhehan had minded, he hadn’t said.

“Do you teach a lot?” Gong Jun asked Zhehan, once they’d set off for the shop.

“Not really. Well,” Zhehan twisted his mouth. “I sort of was thinking of being a teacher.”

“But you became a researcher instead?”

“No.” Zhehan was silent for a moment. “It’s more like I was thinking of not being a researcher any more and becoming a teacher.”

“You’d be a good teacher,” Gong Jun said.

Zhehan flashed a smile at him. “If all my students listened to me as well as you do, maybe.”

“Of course they’d listen to you,” Gong Jun insisted, ignoring the warm feeling the compliment gave him. “You explain things well.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Zhehan said, kicking a pebble away from him.

Gong Jun had Zhehan sit with Qiaoqiao at the table in the window this time. “She’ll probably die if she doesn’t get a chance to ask you her five million questions soon.”

“Don’t be fooled,” Qiaoqiao said to Zhehan when he joined her at the table. “He just wants us both here so our pretty faces can lure in more customers.”

“I didn’t know you think I’m pretty,” Zhehan said to Gong Jun, mouth curving up in a mischievous smile.

“You’re very pretty,” Gong Jun said dutifully. “Not as handsome as me, though.”

Zhehan laughed.

Five million didn’t end up being too much of an exaggeration for the number of questions Qiaoqiao had, it turned out. Gong Jun tuned in and out while he worked through the last few unlabelled boxes in the backroom. The stories Zhehan told today were much more technical. There were fewer pink elephants and a lot more theories of parallelity, whatever that was. Qiaoqiao seemed pleased anyway, asking three more questions for every answer Zhehan gave her.

A little past lunchtime, Daidai finally messaged Gong Jun back. Gong Jun read the message and snorted. “Daidai says he’ll stop by the shop today,” he said when Zhehan looked up. “As long as he gets to meet you.”

“Okay,” Zhehan said, and then, “Who, um, who is Daidai? You haven’t said.”

“Jun-ge’s most annoying friend,” Qiaoqiao answered.

“Yichen is the most annoying,” Gong Jun said, putting his phone down. “He’s a friend from university,” he told Zhehan. “He’s an event planner now, and he knows Yichen too.”

“He knows everyone,” Qiaoqiao said. “And if he doesn’t know them, he knows someone who does.”

Daidai might know everyone, but he wasn’t willing to give up his information for free. First, Gong Jun had to tell him the whole story, with Zhehan helping.

“So you’re just stuck here?” he asked Zhehan.

“Just for now,” Zhehan said. “I’ll figure out a way back.”

“And you’re living together?”

“I wouldn’t just kick him out,” Gong Jun said defensively.

“You kicked me out when my dorm flooded and I had nowhere to go. Lost, alone, cold, damp.”

“You had about thirty other friends to stay with, and I’m sure some of them didn’t mind that you snore so loudly people in neighbouring cities can hear it.”

“I don’t snore, do I?” Zhehan asked.

“You don’t,” Gong Jun assured him.

Daidai looked back and forth between them.

“What?” Gong Jun asked.

“Nothing,” Daidai said, in a way that meant it wasn’t nothing at all. “So you still don’t know where Yichen is?”

“Lihua said he’s dating someone, but she doesn’t know who. The only thing I could think of is maybe he went to visit them?” Gong Jun said.

“Huh.” Daidai tipped his chair back. “And you said he didn’t want his family to know. So not someone approved.” He dropped his chair forward again. “Okay, I think I know someone who might know. Do you know who Wang Tao is? His dad invented self-cleaning frying pans or something. Anyway, he and Yichen started hanging out a lot a few years ago, bonding over being rich or something, I don’t know.”

“Okay, what’s his number? Or can you introduce us?” Gong Jun asked.

“Oh, I’ve never met him,” Daidai said with a grin. “But he’s going to be at a party I planned for some girl’s birthday. On Friday, the week after next. I can sneak you in to meet him.”

“Daidai, today’s Monday.”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s,” Gong Jun stopped to count out the days, “that’s nearly three weeks away.”

“Well, maybe Yichen will come back before then,” Daidai said, getting up from his chair. “But this is the best I can do.”

“Thank you,” Zhehan said quickly. “We appreciate it.”

“Don’t let Junjun boss you around in the meantime,” Daidai advised. He adjusted his bag and walked to the door. “I’ll text you the details later.”

Five minutes after he left, Gong Jun’s phone vibrated. When he checked it, he had one message from Daidai.

Guess he’s not sleeping on the sofa if he thinks you might hear him snoring.

Gong Jun put his phone away and went back to work.

“You really don’t cook, do you?” Gong Jun asked, when Zhehan had to be shown how to wash the rice properly while they made dinner together that night.

“There’s always takeout or someone to cook for me,” Zhehan said. “My ma, or friends, or whoever. I can cook some things,” he added, filling the pot with water. “Just not, you know.”

“Things you’d serve other people?”

“Yeah, exactly.” Zhehan grinned at Gong Jun. “Why make anyone suffer if they can cook something much better for both of us?”

“You never thought of learning?” Gong Jun made his voice sound casual. “You know, to cook for someone special or whatever.”

Zhehan rubbed some rice grains in his hand haphazardly. “My someone specials always cooked for me.” He tipped the pot over to drain the water. “Not that there’s much time for dating with how much I travel, anyway.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, if I’m regularly spending six months living in another world, who wants to deal with that? Not much point in dating someone who’s never there.”

“Right.” Gong Jun concentrated on adjusting the dial on the stove. He hadn’t asked for any particular reason. It wasn’t his business who Zhehan did or didn’t date.

“I’m not travelling much these days, though. I thought it would be nice to be at home.” Zhehan laughed. “Things didn’t go exactly to plan, obviously. My apartment flooded, so I had to deal with that. I had to send my dog to stay with a friend because I couldn’t find any hotels that would allow pets. And then, I found a place to stay, but you know what happened next.

“Don’t apologize,” he added quickly when Gong Jun opened his mouth to do exactly that. “I already told you this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

“More fun than pink elephants?”

“Way more fun than pink elephants.” Zhehan smiled down at the rice. “The research isn’t always as interesting as it sounds. A lot of the time it’s boring and lonely, and if something goes wrong, there’s so much paperwork.”

“Is that why you wanted to start teaching instead?”

“That’s part of it.” Zhehan fit the pot into the rice cooker. “It’ll be nice to just be in one place, too. Maybe I can settle down. My family would like it if I could see them more, too.”

Zhehan’s family, who lived in a different world from Gong Jun, probably would like to see him more. Zhehan could see them more when he went back to that world, which was a different one from the one Gong Jun lived in.

“Do you think that’s what’s going on with Yichen?”

“What?” Gong Jun focused back on Zhehan.

“If he’s dating someone, and this is his house, could the person who lived in it before me, in my world, be the person he was seeing?”

Gong Jun held his hand over the pan to test the heat. “But the house doesn’t work properly. You said you couldn’t send things over from your world. And when I pulled you over, I broke everything.”

“Maybe that was the problem,” Zhehan said. He was looking at the buttons on the rice cooker. “Why are there so many options?”

Gong Jun leaned over and pressed the start button. “What do you mean that was the problem?”

Zhehan turned and leaned against the kitchen counter. “Maybe they were trying to figure out a way to connect their houses so they didn’t have to keep going back and forth.”

Gong Jun stared at him. “But that would mean Yichen has some other way to travel across worlds, and he met this person while doing that. It’d mean he’s known about other worlds this whole time.”

“Maybe that’s why no one knows where he is,” Zhehan said. “If he’s in my world right now meeting up with his person.”

Gong Jun turned back around and started dribbling oil in the pan. “Do you think it could work?” he asked. “Connecting the houses, I mean.”

Zhehan leaned back and stared into the distance. When Gong Jun looked over, he could see the thoughts shuttling past behind his eyes. “Not really,” Zhehan said finally. “It would mean trying to make two different houses exist on top of each other. You can’t do that.”

Gong Jun looked back down at the pan and hurriedly tipped the oil bottle upright. The entire bottom of the pan was covered in oil.

“What do you think about more magic lessons, by the way? Since we’re stuck waiting anyway.”

Gong Jun slid garlic and ginger off his cutting board and into the pan. “You really don’t have to.”

“Who else is going to teach you?” Zhehan asked, poking Gong Jun’s shoulder. “There’s no point in finding another teacher for you while I’m still here. And I’m not saying I’ll do it for free. I want something in return.”

Gong Jun glanced at him. Zhehan had the same mischievous smile that he’d had when he asked Gong Jun if he thought he was pretty.

“What?”

“Teach me to cook. And other things. Like how not to fill a room with soap when I’m mopping.”

“That seems like I’m getting more out of it than you.”

“What are you talking about?” Zhehan hoisted himself up to sit on the counter. “I told you I’m planning not to travel much anymore. I need to know how to do all this stuff now. Otherwise, who would ever want to live with me?”

Gong Jun added diced onion to the pan. Of course it made perfect sense that Zhehan would want to learn a few household skills. Since he wanted to settle down. And not travel anymore.

“Fine,” he said, “but you’re not allowed to use any cleaning products without supervision.”

“Deal,” Zhehan said. Gong Jun could hear the smile in his voice.

Magic lessons weren’t quite what Gong Jun expected them to be. For one thing, Zhehan seemed to just be making up random lessons from whatever he could find lying around.

“We’re starting small so I can see what you’re capable of,” he explained when Gong Jun asked.

“I summoned you here from another world,” Gong Jun reminded him.

Zhehan laughed. “When you’re not annoyed or angry, I mean.”

So Gong Jun bit down his impatience and tried to make pencils zoom across paper, and boil water with a snap of his fingers. He tried to stop oranges in midair when Zhehan threw them and make the apples in his fruit bowl arrange themselves into a pyramid. The pencils barely managed to stand on their own, let alone write anything, and the water was tepid at most. The oranges usually landed on the ground before he could stop them and the apples occasionally twitched in the direction he wanted them to go in, before coming to a stop.

“Why isn’t it working?” Gong Jun asked one day. They were both sitting at the counter while Gong Jun tried to make a paper airplane fly around the shop. The plane coasted to the ground every time he tossed it in the air.

Zhehan snapped his fingers and made the plane fly back to Gong Jun, who caught it. “Why do you think it’s not working?”

Gong Jun sighed. Zhehan was always doing this, answering Gong Jun’s questions with his own. “Magic works when my intentions are clear. So if it’s not working, they’re not clear enough.”

“So what do you think is blocking your intentions?”

Gong Jun unfolded and refolded the plane in his hands. If he knew what was blocking his intentions, he wouldn’t have to ask.

“You ask a lot of questions when we start lessons,” Zhehan said, when Gong Jun didn’t answer. “About what might happen.”

Gong Jun needed to ask questions. He couldn’t use his magic without knowing exactly how Zhehan would stop him if he made a mistake.

“It’s good to consider the consequences,” Zhehan continued, “but if you can’t stop thinking about what might go wrong, your intentions will be weak.”

Gong Jun kept his eyes on the plane in his hands. “I can’t just stop thinking about it.”

Zhehan was silent for long enough that Gong Jun sneaked a glance. Zhehan was looking steadily at him. His head was tilted to the side, in the way Gong Jun had learned to recognize as his thinking pose.

“I have a question,” Zhehan said at last. “You don’t have to answer me, but I think it might help.”

Gong Jun smoothed out the folds of the plane again. “What is it?”

“The first day I was here, I asked if you could remember anything from when you were a kid that could’ve been your magic,” Zhehan said. “You didn’t answer.”

“What kind of things did you do?” Gong Jun asked, stalling for time.

“Lots of things I shouldn’t have,” Zhehan said. His nose scrunched up when he smiled and really meant it, Gong Jun had noticed. “Mostly it was just when I wanted little things. You know, like candy for lunch, or for my vegetables to disappear off my plate so I wouldn’t have to eat them, things like that.”

“So they just disappeared because you wanted them to?”

“Not disappeared exactly,” Zhehan said, smile stretching wider. “They have to go somewhere. Mine ended up in our next door neighbour’s garden. When my parents found out, I had to go pick them all out of the dirt.”

Gong Jun imagined a much smaller Zhehan digging through the dirt for remnants of braised eggplant. He smiled.

“Did you do anything like that?” Zhehan asked. “Something you got in trouble for, maybe?”

Gong Jun darted his eyes around the shop. Qiaoqiao was out of earshot, helping a customer.

“I meant it when I said you don’t have to answer,” Zhehan said, voice quieter than before. “But I also meant it when I said I think it would help.”

Gong Jun put the plane down and rested his hands on the counter. The coolness of the surface was calming. He could see Zhehan watching him out of the corner of his eye. Zhehan had already been so patient with him, he should tell him something, at least.

“I remembered,” he stopped. It was even harder to say than he thought it would be. He took a breath and continued. “I remembered some things, mostly small, some not, that I didn’t understand. I never thought it was magic, just wishes that came true for some reason.” Zhehan had scooted his stool closer while Gong Jun talked and pressed his knee against Gong Jun’s. “I never got in trouble, though I should have, because no one knew it was me.” He looked at Zhehan. “Later, when I was older, I realized all those things couldn’t be my fault, but now I know they were. I didn’t mean for them to happen, and definitely not in the way that they happened. Maybe there were even more times I used magic and I just didn’t know.”

Zhehan didn’t press him for details. He placed his hand on Gong Jun’s forearm. “I can teach you to only use magic when you intend to, but you have to trust me and focus.”

Gong Jun nodded, looking back down at the counter. That was what he wanted to do, he just couldn’t figure out how.

Zhehan squeezed his arm and let go. He got off his stool. “Let’s take a break. I want to know more about those levitation charms you showed me yesterday.”

Gong Jun followed him, grateful for the distraction.

Zhehan was curious about a lot more than levitation charms. He had questions for Gong Jun on everything from how luck charms worked to why his phone had no number buttons.

“No one knows how luck charms work,” Gong Jun told him. “Except Professor Li. She’s the only one who sells them.”

“Not the only one,” Qiaoqiao said, sliding a shelf onto its brackets.

Some of the new display stands Gong Jun had ordered had finally arrived. Qiaoqiao was assembling the new shelving sets while he and Zhehan emptied the ones they were replacing.

“The Lius sell them too,” Gong Jun explained to Zhehan.

“The Lius, as in?”

Gong Jun nodded. “Yichen’s family. Their store is up the street.”

“That’s why Jun-ge is here,” Qiaoqiao said. “They’re stealing all our customers.”

Zhehan glanced at him. “I thought you always worked here, and were just staying at Yichen’s house to cat-sit.”

Gong Jun pulled the last box off the shelf they were working on and put it on the floor. “It’s a multi-purpose trip. I normally work for my family in Chengdu.”

“His mom volunteered him,” Qiaoqiao said. She spritzed the new shelving unit with cleaning solution and started wiping it down. “So he can report back on his findings.”

Zhehan looked at him questioningly.

“She went to school with Yichen’s dad and hates him,” Gong Jun explained. “She thinks if they’re outselling Professor Li, there must be something suspicious happening.”

He had already called his mom and told her that wasn’t true. It wasn’t surprising that people were choosing to go to the Lius’. Their store was clean and new and shiny, and Professor Li’s shop was more like a mildly organized pile of stuff. Her sales numbers had dipped enough that she wasn’t going to be able to operate her shop for much longer if things didn’t improve.

“So why are the Lius the only other people who sell luck charms?” Zhehan asked. He crossed over to the window, peering through it in the direction of their shop.

“Nefarious reasons,” Qiaoqiao said darkly, with a particularly violent spritz of the spray bottle.

“Professor Li invented them,” Gong Jun said. “No one else could figure out how they worked, until about seven months ago, when the Lius started selling them too.”

“Are they the same as hers?” Zhehan asked. He was still trying to see the Lius’ shop from the window. When neither Gong Jun nor Qiaoqiao answered, he looked back at them. “Have either of you actually been to their shop?”

“It would be a bit—” Gong Jun hesitated.

“Like a crime, basically,” Qiaoqiao said. “His mom would kill him,” she pointed at Gong Jun, “and they won’t let me in after I made some adjustments to their sign.”

“What did you do with it?” Gong Jun asked, fascinated.

“Nothing you need to know about.”

Gong Jun decided not to ask any more questions. He turned back to Zhehan in time to see him grab Gong Jun’s phone off the counter.

“You use this to pay for things, right?” Zhehan asked. “Show me how?”

“Why?” Gong Jun asked, automatically doing so anyway.

“Thanks,” Zhehan said. He walked out the door and headed in the direction of the Lius’ shop up the street.

“Is he doing recon?” Qiaoqiao asked. She sounded impressed.

“I don’t know.” Gong Jun walked over to the window and watched Zhehan disappear from view.

When Zhehan came back half an hour later, it was from the other direction. “I circled the block, just in case,” he said when he walked in.

He dumped the contents of a paper bag on the counter. Gong Jun and Qiaoqiao walked over to take a closer look. There were five silk balls, all different colours. “These were set up in their biggest display, so I got one of each.”

“They’re their version of luck charms,” Qiaoqiao said. She picked up one of the silk balls. “This one is for luck in exams.” She pointed to each of the silk balls in turn. “That one’s for career luck, that one’s for starting a new family, that one’s for a new home and that one’s for romance.”

Zhehan picked up the romance silk ball and turned it over in his hands. He brought it up close to his face and sniffed it. “Why are they all scented?”

Qiaoqiao shrugged. “Whatever the ingredients are, I guess. I don’t know what they could be using. Ours aren’t scented at all.”

Zhehan sniffed the silk ball again. “It smells familiar, but I don’t recognize it.” He held it up to the light and looked at it. “I’ll take them home and look at them more.”

“Home?” Gong Jun asked.

“Oh, not home—well, your home—sort of,” Zhehan said. He busied himself with putting the silk balls back in the paper bag. His hair wasn’t tied back today, so Gong Jun couldn’t be sure, but he thought Zhehan’s ears had started to turn pink again.

Gong Jun woke up the next morning to find Cat on his pillow, batting at his nose again. He tried to move away and found he couldn’t. Zhehan’s chest was pressed against his back. His hand was clenched in the front of Gong Jun’s t-shirt.

“Stop that,” he whispered to Cat. “I’m getting up.” She jumped down from the bed and moved to the armchair in the corner of the room, watching him. Gong Jun placed his hand over Zhehan’s and started loosening his grip. He had woken up like this a handful of times since that first morning, with Zhehan pressed as close to him as he could manage. Sometimes he was tempted to stay like that, warm and comfortable, with the heavy weight of Zhehan’s arm as an excuse to keep himself there.

Cat hadn’t gotten used to this arrangement yet. Two people on the bed meant there was no space for her to stretch out in the luxurious way to which she was accustomed. She had taken to waking Gong Jun up even earlier than before and then sitting on the armchair while she waited for him to get out of bed, staring at him with baleful eyes.

Gong Jun stopped to let her bump her head against his palm and give her a head scratch on his way to the bathroom. “Don’t look at me like that,” he whispered to her. “You can sleep in lots of places. He doesn’t fit anywhere else.”

Cat was waiting for him in the kitchen by her food bowl when he came downstairs. Gong Jun sighed and sat on the floor next to her. Cat had started demanding company while she ate her breakfast. He pulled out his phone, petting Cat with his other hand.

Daidai had sent him a long message with details about the party. Gong Jun checked the date. It was only a week and a half away.

“Good morning.” Zhehan walked into the kitchen, hair still sleep-tousled.

“Morning.”

The bit of hair that always stuck up over Zhehan’s forehead in the mornings was present as usual. Gong Jun watched it bounce while Zhehan poured himself a glass of water and sat down at the table.

“No work today, right?” Zhehan asked, after taking a sip.

“No work,” Gong Jun confirmed.

“What do you want to do today?” Zhehan asked, covering a yawn with his mouth.

Gong Jun held up his phone. “Daidai sent more information about the party. He’s going to sneak us in the back and get us clothes to blend in, but he doesn’t know your sizes.”

Zhehan looked down at his shirt. “How do clothing sizes work here? All I know is I’m not the same size as you.”

“If you let me buy you some, you can find out.” Gong Jun had made the offer twice already, but Zhehan had refused, opting to continue wearing Gong Jun’s clothes instead. All of Gong Jun’s shirts and sweaters were just a little bit too large on Zhehan, and all of his pants were just a smidge too long but also too small in the hip.

“You can’t just buy me clothes,” Zhehan said firmly.

“You’re going to have to try some on at least, so we can tell Daidai your size,” Gong Jun said. “You might as well let me buy a few things.” Zhehan hesitated for long enough that Gong Jun knew he had won. “Make me dinner tonight as payment,” he added. “Then we’re even.”

“I don’t think a dinner made by me is fair payment.” Zhehan made such an exaggerated face of horror that Gong Jun couldn’t help laughing.

“It must be fair payment because obviously you’ve absorbed everything I’ve taught you so far.”

“Obviously,” Zhehan said.

“So I guess I’m buying you some clothes today and then you’re going to make me dinner.”

“Fine,” Zhehan agreed, “but you have to eat it all, no matter what.”

Gong Jun found it easy to make that agreement in the morning, with the sunshine pouring in from the window and gilding Zhehan’s hair. He had no trouble with it while he was helping Zhehan pick out new clothes.

“But not shirts or anything,” Zhehan said. “Don’t spend too much. Yours are only a little too big.”

It was a little different when he was sitting at the kitchen table staring down at his plate.

“What? You don’t have tacos here?” Zhehan said.

“We have tacos,” Gong Jun said. He poked at the limp thing on his plate. Mystifyingly, there was a piece of wilted lettuce on top of it. “I just don’t know what this is.”

“It’s definitely and obviously a taco.” Zhehan picked up his own taco and took a big bite. Gong Jun watched as he struggled to control his expression. “Mmm, delicious,” he said before breaking out into a laugh. “Wait, you don’t actually have to eat it,” he said when Gong Jun pulled his own plate closer.

“Not eat this magnificent taco that you made for me with your own two hands?” Gong Jun grinned and pulled out his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Evidence.” Gong Jun snapped a photo before Zhehan could snatch the plate away. “If I die, the newspapers can use it when they run the story.”

Zhehan’s squawk of outrage made Gong Jun laugh so hard, his fingers didn’t have the strength to pick up the taco after all.

Not all of their household lessons went quite as badly as cooking did. Zhehan really was good at cleaning as long as he was given very specific instructions.

“So what do you think you did wrong this time?” Gong Jun asked when Zhehan managed to dye all the spare sheets pink.

“Umm.” Zhehan folded the pillowcase in his hands and put it on the bed. Gong Jun made a note to refold it before he put it away. “Wrong kind of detergent?”

“We only have one kind of laundry detergent,” Gong Jun said. He held up a red sock.

“Weird how that got in there,” Zhehan said, suddenly very interested in folding the remaining pillowcases. “How do we make the sheets not pink?” He snuck a glance at Gong Jun.

“We don’t,” Gong Jun said. “They’re Yichen’s sheets.”

Zhehan smiled at that.

Zhehan was much better at helping rearrange the shop than he was at chores. With his help, it was starting to look more like a place to buy things, and less like Professor Li’s personal storage.

“Do you still need these?”

Gong Jun looked over. Zhehan was looking through the box of Professor Li’s sales and inventory notebooks Gong Jun had kept under the counter. “Better keep them, just in case,” he said. “There was a lot in there that had nothing to do with the shop.”

Zhehan opened one of the notebooks and started to flip through it. He stopped to look at a page more closely. “Can I take a look?” he asked. “There’s some diagrams in here I don’t understand.”

“I don’t think Professor Li would mind,” Gong Jun said.

Zhehan pulled a few of the notebooks out and put the rest of the box back under the counter. When they left the shop that evening, Zhehan tucked one under his arm to bring home.

“So is this what you do?” Zhehan asked him later that night.

They were both sitting on the sofa. Zhehan was still reading through one of Professor Li’s notebooks while Gong Jun was flipping through channels on the TV. Cat, when faced with the difficult decision of whose lap to sleep on, had opted to curl up on an armchair by herself again.

“Sales…business…stuff,” Zhehan elaborated, when Gong Jun looked at him.

“What did you think I do?” Gong Jun asked.

“Make things…pretty?”

Gong Jun started laughing.

“That is what you do,” Zhehan insisted, smiling.

“That’s part of it,” Gong Jun said, when his laughter subsided. “I manage my parents’ business for them, and I help some of my uncles and aunts out a bit too. Sometimes someone asks for help revamping their shop, and I usually say yes.”

“Do you like it?” Zhehan looked like he was genuinely curious.

“It’s—” Gong Jun thought it over. “It’s useful. If I’d had magic—I mean, if anyone had known I had magic—then I’d have gone into something else, but this is good too. I can help out my family and the money is good.”

Zhehan drummed his fingers on the back of the notebook he was holding open. “If you could do something else, would you?”

“I—” Gong Jun leaned his head back against the sofa and stared at the ceiling. “I don’t know what else I’d do. I never thought about it.” He turned his head to look at Zhehan. “I just wanted to do something useful.”

Zhehan nodded. “You could do something useful but that you like, too.”

“Like you?”

Zhehan smiled, but there was no big nose scrunch, or now-familiar eye crinkles. “Like me,” he agreed.

“Why are you thinking of becoming a teacher if you like research so much?” Gong Jun asked. He knew Zhehan well enough now to know just how much he enjoyed his work. Zhehan liked asking questions and testing theories. He liked finding the edges of a clue and digging it up to solve a mystery.

Zhehan put the notebook down on his chest and leaned back against the sofa like Gong Jun. “I like it, but—it’s time for something new.” He turned his head to look at Gong Jun and smiled softly. “And teaching is fun, especially when I have such a dedicated student.”

Gong Jun turned his head away to sit up straight. It was too much to be smiled at like that from so close.

Gong Jun didn’t feel like a dedicated student the next morning, when Zhehan decided to hold their lesson outside. He shivered, wrapping his arms around himself. It was cold enough at this time of year that the jasmine vine draped over the wall had stopped blooming, and everyone walking past them was bundled up warm. “Why do we have to be standing in the street in the middle of December?” he asked.

“Fresh air will help you think better,” Zhehan said. “And it’s barely chilly.” Zhehan was comfortably bundled in Gong Jun’s coziest cardigan. “I’ve been to much colder places.”

“I haven’t,” Gong Jun grumbled.

“Stop complaining,” Zhehan rolled his eyes fondly. He tugged Gong Jun to stand in front of him with a hand on his arm. “Come on, we’re trying something different today.”

“Different how?”

“You’re going to try something on me.”

“Absolutely not.” Magic had gotten easier since they’d talked about the wishes. Gong Jun could manage to do what Zhehan asked some of the time now, and without any unexpected accidents. The more they practiced, the more comfortable he was using his magic, but not comfortable enough to use it on Zhehan.

“It’s a simple spell. The one I used to stick my feet to the ground,” Zhehan said, bouncing up on his toes.

Simple spells could still go wrong. Gong Jun crossed his arms. “I could still hurt you if I do it wrong.”

“Okay,” Zhehan said, standing back a little from Gong Jun, stepping out further into the street. “What if we talk it through first? No magic. If you still don’t want to afterwards, we can do something else.”

Gong Jun uncrossed his arms slowly. He couldn’t hurt anyone by just thinking through the spell. “Okay,” he said.

Zhehan smiled at him. “Okay. Let’s start with intentions. What kind of intentions would you need for this spell?”

Gong Jun thought. “If your feet are stuck to the ground, you can’t go anywhere, so my intentions are that you can’t leave?”

“Or that you want me to stay right here, exactly where I am. Remember, positive intentions are stronger than negative ones.” Zhehan stopped and looked down at his feet. “Wow, I didn’t even tell you to start.”

“What?”

Zhehan moved as if to take a step forward but his foot wouldn’t come off the pavement. He looked back up at Gong Jun and smiled. “See? You just needed to focus your intentions. When you concentrate on what you want, it’s easy.”

“But I didn’t do anything.” Gong Jun’s heart started beating faster. He wasn’t sure he had even thought of much at all. Just that it would be nice if Zhehan really did stay, just for a little bit longer, at least. A buzzing was starting in his ears. Learning how to think through his intentions was supposed to stop him from using his magic by accident, not make it happen.

“You’re doing things instinctually,” Zhehan said. “That’s good. Now you just have to master how to channel your intentions on purpose.”

“But what—” Gong Jun’s eyes widened.

The buzzing wasn’t in his ears. There was a scooter coming down the street straight towards them. The driver was going fast, much too fast to stop.

Gong Jun grabbed Zhehan’s arm and tried to pull him out of the way, but he wouldn’t budge. He saw the moment the driver noticed and realized he was going to hit them, but it was too late. He was going to crash right into Zhehan and it was all Gong Jun’s fault.

Zhehan snapped his fingers. The scooter froze. The driver was frozen too, eyes wide open in shock.

“Gong Jun, Gong Jun, look at me,” Zhehan was speaking quickly but he sounded as calm as always. “Gong Jun, I can’t hold the scooter still and undo your spell at the same time. You need to undo it on your own, okay?”

Gong Jun was still holding onto Zhehan’s arm. He tried to pull on him again but it was useless. Zhehan remained exactly where he was.

“Not like that, Junjun,” Zhehan said. “What is it you want right now?”

“For you to be safe,” Gong Jun managed to croak out.

“And how can I be safe?”

“If you can move,” Gong Jun said. “If you can go wherever you want.”

This time when he pulled on Zhehan’s arm, it worked.

Zhehan stepped close to the wall, out of the way of the scooter, pushing Gong Jun with him. He snapped his fingers again. The scooter started moving, zooming past them.

Zhehan turned to Gong Jun. “Are you okay?”

Gong Jun looked him over just long enough to satisfy himself that he wasn’t hurt. When he was absolutely sure that he couldn’t see any bruises or scrapes, he walked through the gate and back inside the house.

“Gong Jun?”

The knock was just as hesitant as the previous times and Gong Jun ignored it just as he had before. He traced a finger over a knot in the floorboard next to him, sitting against the foot of the bed. This time, instead of footsteps walking away, Gong Jun heard the sound of the door creaking open.

Zhehan poked his head through the gap, took one look at him, and walked in. Cat padded into the room behind him and made a beeline for Gong Jun. She pawed at his legs until he lowered his knees and stretched his legs out in front of him. Cat stepped up onto his thighs and curled herself into a ball, pressed against his abdomen. Zhehan sat down on the floor next to him, close enough that their shoulders were touching.

“It was an accident,” he said, when Gong Jun didn’t say anything. “That’s all.”

Gong Jun pet Cat slowly and still said nothing. Calling it an accident was just an excuse. His father getting hurt had been his fault, and now he had almost done the same thing to Zhehan. He had spent so long wishing he had magic like everyone else, but he would rather not have magic at all than hurt someone again.

Zhehan nudged him with his shoulder. “People make mistakes all the time and this barely counts. And nothing happened. We fixed it, right?”

Zhehan didn’t know. That’s why he could say things like that. If he knew what Gong Jun had done, he wouldn’t—Gong Jun closed his eyes. He had to tell Zhehan so he would understand. “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” Gong Jun said, opening his eyes. He kept petting Cat to give himself something to do with his hands.

“Okay.” Gong Jun could feel Zhehan’s gaze on him. “Do you want to tell me now?” Zhehan asked. His voice sounded as calm as it had when he’d been seconds away from being run over.

Gong Jun let that calmness wash over him until he felt he could speak. Zhehan waited patiently next to him. He had pressed in a little closer so Gong Jun’s entire side was warm where they touched.

“My dad was in an accident. When I was small, I mean,” Gong Jun started. “I was there too. We were going to the dentist, which I hated. I—” his voice faltered. He took a deep breath before continuing. “I wished that the car would just stop, and then it did.” He turned his head to look right at Zhehan before he spoke again. “We were rear ended and then another car hit us from the side. I was okay, but my dad broke his leg and one of his arms and he had to wear a neck brace for months.”

Zhehan didn’t look as horrified as he had expected him to look, or disappointed. Instead, he wrapped an arm around Gong Jun’s shoulders and pulled him closer. “That was an accident too. You didn’t know.”

“I did know,” Gong Jun said, focusing on Zhehan’s knees. It was important that Zhehan understood. “I didn’t know why and it didn’t work all the time, but I knew if I really wanted something, I could make it happen.”

“You didn’t know what the consequences would be,” Zhehan said. “You didn’t even know if it would work for sure.” He rubbed his hand up and down Gong Jun’s arm. “You were a kid who didn’t know anything. It wasn’t your fault.”

“If I hadn’t been thinking so hard about not wanting to go to the dentist—”

“And if the driver behind you had been more careful, he wouldn’t have hit you in the first place,” Zhehan interrupted. “It’s not your fault.”

“But—”

“No, listen to me,” Zhehan said, voice louder than before. “Do you want to know what it looks like when something is your fault?” He pulled his arm away from Gong Jun’s shoulders and shifted away. “I told you I fucked up my knee playing basketball, right? And I told you I was thinking of switching to teaching instead of research.”

Gong Jun nodded. He had never seen Zhehan look upset before.

“What I didn’t tell you is that when I injured my knee, I had another research trip planned right after. We were supposed to go to a world that’s mostly ice, and my boss told me if I didn’t go, there wouldn’t be enough people to make the trip.

“So even though I should have gotten my knee looked at properly, I went. At first it was fine, my knee hurt a bit but no one really noticed and we were getting samples of all kinds of plants we’d never seen anywhere else. Then one day I slipped on the ice.” Zhehan closed his eyes for a moment. “They had to put my whole leg in a brace. I could barely move around by myself. I wasn’t cleared to go on another research trip for a whole year, and when I could finally start again, no one would assign me the good stuff. That’s why I was going to switch to teaching. Research isn’t fun anymore.”

Gong Jun’s hands had clenched into fists while Zhehan talked. His heart was beating loudly in his ears. It had been a long time since he had felt this angry. Zhehan had avoided looking at him while he spoke, like he really believed he was to blame.

Gong Jun counted to ten in his head before he spoke, slowly unfurling his fingers until he could rest one hand on Cat’s warm fur again. “That doesn’t sound like it was your fault either,” he said evenly. “You said your boss pressured you to go.”

“I didn’t have to listen,” Zhehan said.

“Maybe not,” Gong Jun said, “but it probably didn’t feel like you had a choice. And you couldn’t have known what would happen when you got there.” Zhehan still wasn’t looking at him. Gong Jun shifted closer to him. “No one should have asked you to go in the first place. People should have been looking out for you.” His heart was still much too loud, but at least his voice was measured.

The room was quiet for a long time, but Gong Jun waited. When Zhehan finally looked back up at Gong Jun, he was smiling.

“You said ‘either.’ You said it didn’t sound like it was my fault ‘either.’ So that means the accident wasn’t your fault, right?”

“I—”

Gong Jun stopped and stared at Zhehan. It was a real smile on Zhehan’s face, not one of his big ones, but still real. “You tricked me.”

Zhehan laughed, leaning into Gong Jun’s side. “I didn’t trick you! I just helped you think things through.”

“Da-ge,” Gong Jun said, rocking away before leaning back into Zhehan. He made sure to make his voice into a pout. “That’s not fair.”

“It’s plenty fair,” Zhehan said, shoving his shoulder. “Do you know how long you’ve been up here? I was worried. You haven’t even eaten.”

Gong Jun was suddenly aware of how hollow his stomach felt. “I’ll make dinner.”

“No.” Zhehan smacked his leg. “Didn’t you absorb the other important lesson in my story?”

“What lesson?” Gong Jun moved Cat off his lap and stood up.

“It’s important to rest when you’re hurt,” Zhehan said. “Order us takeout,” he said in his most bossy voice. “We’re going to have a movie night.”

He held his hand out to Gong Jun. Gong Jun grabbed it and helped him up.

Zhehan stayed close while they walked downstairs to the living room. After he pushed Gong Jun onto the sofa, he took Gong Jun’s phone and ordered food for them, sitting close enough next to him so Gong Jun could look at his phone screen over Zhehan’s shoulder. Cat jumped back onto Gong Jun’s lap when she had judged that he was unlikely to get up anytime soon.

It was cozy to sit like that, with Cat purring on his lap and Zhehan next to him, refusing to let him get up to help when their takeout arrived. It was cozier still when, halfway through the movie, Zhehan fell asleep, leaning against his side. Gong Jun turned down the TV volume and shifted so Zhehan could rest his head more comfortably against his shoulder. Zhehan made a snuffling noise in his sleep and leaned further into Gong Jun, slipping his arm through Gong Jun’s.

Gong Jun smiled. Zhehan had insisted on staying close to him all evening, even in his sleep, as if he could guard Gong Jun from his worries with his presence alone. Maybe he could. Gong Jun always felt safe around Zhehan. It was impossible not to feel safe. Zhehan was always patient with him when they had their lessons, even when Gong Jun didn’t see how he could be, even when Gong Jun had failed for the fifth time in a row. It made Gong Jun want to do better, to be better, so Zhehan would look at him and smile.

Gong Jun liked the way Zhehan smiled, the way his eyes crinkled. The way he tilted his head when he was thinking. Gong Jun liked the way his hair bounced in the morning and the way he rolled up the too-big sleeves of Gong Jun’s shirts.

Maybe if Gong Jun worked hard enough, Zhehan would want to stay. After they figured out how to go to Zhehan’s world, they could travel back and forth so they could see both their families. They could find someplace else to live together after Yichen came back, if Zhehan wanted. Gong Jun would like that, he wanted—his breath caught.

He looked down at Zhehan, still sleeping peacefully on his shoulder. He wanted Zhehan to stay with him. He liked Zhehan and he wanted him to stay. His heart thumped in his chest.

Zhehan made another noise in his sleep. Gong Jun started guiltily. He should wake Zhehan so he could sleep comfortably in bed. He tried to extract his arm, but Zhehan held onto it tightly and turned his face into Gong Jun’s shoulder.

“Zhehan,” Gong Jun said quietly. “Wake up. Let’s go upstairs.” He used his other hand to shake Zhehan’s shoulder gently. Gong Jun felt Zhehan’s grip on his arm tighten for a second before Zhehan let go, blinking awake.

“Come on,” Gong Jun said, moving Cat off his lap, standing up and pulling Zhehan with him. He kept his hand on Zhehan’s back while they walked to the stairs. When Zhehan stumbled, he wrapped an arm around his waist instead.

Zhehan closed his eyes again as soon as he was lying down. By the time Gong Jun got into bed after brushing his teeth, Zhehan had rolled over to face the middle of the bed. Gong Jun turned over to face him. The moonlight coming in from the window was too weak to do more than illuminate the contours of Zhehan’s face. He fell asleep like that, tracing the lines and shadows of Zhehan’s face with his eyes.

The next morning, Gong Jun woke early, like he had grown used to doing. He must have turned over in the night, Zhehan was warm behind him. Gong Jun turned in his arms to face him, slowly, so he wouldn’t wake him. Zhehan’s hair had fallen over his face. Gong Jun tucked it behind his ear. He let his hand linger, brushing his knuckles against Zhehan’s cheek, feeling the way Zhehan’s body was pressed against his. He allowed himself the space of one breath, then two, before he forced himself to disentangle himself and get up.

Zhehan seemed more energetic than usual when he finally came downstairs. “What’s gotten into you?” Gong Jun asked with a laugh when Zhehan hip checked him away and then threw an arm over his shoulders and pulled him back, while he washed their breakfast dishes over the sink.

Zhehan swayed side to side, pulling Gong Jun with him. “Just happy, I guess,” he said. Gong Jun just shook his head and smiled. “It’s a big day,” he added.

Gong Jun had almost forgotten. Today was the day of the party.

Zhehan was just as bouncy while they walked to work. He kept bumping into Gong Jun, their hands brushing together more than once. When they reached the shop, he held the door open for Gong Jun, placing his hand on the small of his back to guide him through. He kept his hand on Gong Jun’s back all the way through their short walk to the front counter. He bumped his knee against Gong Jun’s while they sat together, and squeezed Gong Jun’s arm when he wandered into the back room and found him there.

Halfway through the afternoon, after Zhehan had tried to hook his ankle around Gong Jun’s twice and ruffled his hair for the third time, Gong Jun armed himself with a duster and disappeared into the back shelves, which was where Qiaoqiao found him half an hour later.

“What are you doing, exactly?”

Gong Jun kept dusting the shelf. “I don’t know what you mean.” He could hear Zhehan laughing with a customer at the front counter.

“Why are you hiding back here?”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Yeah,” Qiaoqiao agreed, “that’s why you’re all the way back here, cleaning shelves we’re replacing next week, instead of sitting all cozy at the front like usual.”

Gong Jun ignored her, crouching down to reach the bottom shelf. It was much more dusty than he’d expected.

Qiaoqiao nudged his shoe with hers. “You’re not going to talk to me about whatever it is?”

“There isn’t anything to talk about.”

“Yes there is,” Qiaoqiao hissed. “You obviously really like him and he likes you too. I’m losing my mind watching you two circling each other.”

Gong Jun moved on to the next shelf. “It’s none of your business,” he said. Qiaoqiao was misreading the signs, just like he had.

Qiaoqiao dropped to crouch on the ground next to him. “You’re not like this,” she said, poking his knee. “You always make the first move.”

When Gong Jun didn’t say anything else, Qiaoqiao sighed. “Fine, but talk to him, at least. He’s going to notice you’re being weird.”

Gong Jun waited until Qiaoqiao was out of sight before he dropped the duster and covered his face with his hands. Zhehan was a friendly person, that was all. He liked to sling his arm around peoples’ shoulders, or nudge their side, or touch their arm when he walked by. And he was extra giddy today because of the party. He treated Gong Jun just like he would treat anyone else.

It would be wrong to read something into it, especially when they were still sharing a bed. Zhehan would be uncomfortable if he knew what Gong Jun was thinking every time their hands brushed.

Gong Jun took a deep breath and uncovered his face. He would just have to be careful. Even if he hadn’t been worried about making Zhehan uncomfortable, there was no point pursuing someone who was leaving.

By the time Daidai arrived with their clothes for the party, Gong Jun had dusted every single shelf in the store, some of them twice.

“This is only one set of clothes,” he said, holding up the garment bag Daidai had brought with him.

“Change of plans,” Daidai said. He looked at Zhehan. “You’re coming with me. I need to get your pants tailored to fit.”

“What did I send you his sizes for then?” There had been a plan. Gong Jun liked it when people stuck to the plan, especially when the plan involved him sneaking into parties he didn’t belong at.

“Relax,” Daidai said. “My tailor is excellent. He’ll do a rush job for me. You can get to the hotel on your own and we’ll meet you there.

“Besides,” he added, looking at Zhehan consideringly, “then I’ll have time to add a little polish, too.”

Gong Jun was left to wonder what Daidai meant by a little polish for the rest of the afternoon, until Daidai let him into the back door of the hotel and led him to the storeroom where Zhehan was waiting. Zhehan turned to face him when the door opened.

“Your hair,” Gong Jun blurted out.

“Ah, yeah.” Zhehan ran his hands over his hair. It was pinned up in some complicated way Gong Jun couldn't quite figure out. There were little gold crowns holding it in place, and some strands had been left down to curl around his face. “Does it look okay?”

Gong Jun nodded. It looked more than okay. Zhehan was dressed all in black. His shirt looked like it was made of something silky, and the belt around his waist matched the glittering embroidery that covered one side of his suit jacket and lapels.

“You said we’re supposed to blend in,” Gong Jun said to Daidai accusingly. “How can we blend in when he’s literally sparkling?”

“Relax,” Daidai said, “everyone’s going to look like this.”

Gong Jun doubted many people here tonight would look this good, but he kept his thoughts to himself.

“It’ll be easier for you two to blend in once more people have arrived,” Daidai said. “Wait here for now, and I’ll come get you in maybe half an hour.” He closed the door behind him, leaving Gong Jun and Zhehan alone.

“Does it really look okay?” Zhehan asked, tugging on his hair.

“Stop that, you’ll mess it up,” Gong Jun said. He stepped closer and batted Zhehan’s hand away so he could fix his hair himself. “There,” he said, when he was sure every single piece of hair was exactly in place, “now you look perfect.” He looked down. Zhehan was looking up at him. He was so close.

He put his hand down and stepped back. “Do you think it’s better if we split up?”

“Split up?”

“We can cover more ground that way,” Gong Jun said. And he wouldn’t have to spend more time trying to keep his hands off Zhehan.

“That’s true,” Zhehan said slowly. “And I probably know enough about Yichen now that I can fake knowing him, if I see Wang Tao.”

“Right,” Gong Jun said. He wasn’t sure why Zhehan looked disappointed. The faster they found Wang Tao, the faster they could figure out where Yichen was and find out how to get Zhehan home.

“Okay,” Zhehan said. “Should we go in separately, then? You can go first and I’ll follow five minutes after.”

Gong Jun nodded. That was perfect. He’d have time to lose himself in the crowd and wouldn’t even notice where Zhehan was.

“Wait one sec.” Before Gong Jun could move away, Zhehan stepped in close. He started undoing Gong Jun’s tie. “If you take your jacket off, you’ll look like a waiter with this on,” Zhehan explained. He pulled the tie off and rolled it up.

“I wasn’t planning to take my jacket off,” Gong Jun said. His voice came out significantly higher than he wanted.

“Well you never know,” Zhehan said, smiling up at him. He stepped back and put the tie on the shelf behind him. “We can come back for it after.”

Gong Jun remembered to breathe. By the time he met up with Zhehan after the party, he’d feel calm again.

It was much sooner than Gong Jun had anticipated, when he saw Zhehan working his way slowly through the crowd. He really did sparkle, Gong Jun thought, watching him. If Zhehan had looked good in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the storeroom, he looked ten times better here in the warm light of the ballroom. He was talking to a man who was laughing at something he said. His hand was on Zhehan’s arm.

Gong Jun turned away and took a sip of his drink. It was to be expected that people would try to flirt with Zhehan. Zhehan could even flirt back if he wanted. It wasn’t like Gong Jun had any right to stop him. And Zhehan clearly liked to flirt. He did it with Gong Jun all the time. Gong Jun took another big sip of his drink. He should go to another corner of the room, so they could cover more ground. Ideally, he shouldn’t see Zhehan at all. Then he’d know for sure that they were covering different sections of the room.

Despite Gong Jun’s best efforts, it felt like he could never manage to lose Zhehan for long before he popped up again, on the edges of whatever part of the crowd Gong Jun had lost himself in. After the fifth time Gong Jun had had to turn and walk away, he finally gave up, letting himself watch Zhehan out of the corner of his eye while he scanned the crowd for Wang Tao.

Zhehan had a way of talking to people. He seemed to have no trouble slipping himself into conversations, laughing and smiling with strangers as easily as if they were his closest friends. Gong Jun tried to focus on the people around him. He should be having his own conversations with strangers so maybe one of them would tell him where Wang Tao was.

While Gong Jun tried to find a way to involve himself in the groups of people he kept hovering on the edges of, Zhehan chatted and flirted some more with people Gong Jun tried not to look very hard at. The man who had had his hand on Zhehan’s arm earlier showed up more than once, like he couldn’t help himself. That, at least, was understandable. Gong Jun would also have stuck himself to Zhehan’s side for the rest of the evening if he could. Zhehan didn’t seem to be trying too hard to get rid of the man, either, smiling politely whenever he managed to get his attention. That was understandable, too. Gong Jun was a very understanding person.

“And why haven’t I seen you around before?”

Gong Jun tore his gaze away from Zhehan. There was a woman in front of him who was giving him an appraising look. “Who are you?” he asked, before he realized how rude that would sound.

The woman just smiled. “That depends. Who are you?”

“I’m—” Gong Jun couldn’t remember the backstory he had made up. “I’m a friend of the birthday girl.” Gong Jun hoped she wouldn’t ask any follow up questions. He wasn’t sure who the birthday girl was.

“Aren’t we all?” the woman said. She took a step closer to Gong Jun. He took half a step back. “But who are you the rest of the time? I would remember if I’d met you before.”

“There you are.” Gong Jun felt an arm slip around his waist. “I was looking for you.” Zhehan winked at him before turning to the woman. “You don’t mind if I steal him away for a bit, do you?”

Before she could answer, Zhehan had whisked Gong Jun away. “I think it’s easier if we stick together,” he whispered to Gong Jun. “We can back each other up.”

“Back each other up?” Gong Jun asked. Zhehan’s arm felt so warm it was hard to concentrate.

“Let me handle all the conversation and you keep an eye out for Wang Tao,” Zhehan said. “You’re taller anyway, you’ll spot him first.”

Gong Jun was only a handful of centimetres taller than Zhehan, maybe two handfuls. They both easily towered over most of the people in the room. “Okay,” he said. Maybe strange handsome men would think twice about talking to Zhehan if he was there.

With Zhehan at his side, it was easier to slip in and out of the little groups that had formed all over the room. Zhehan kept his arm around Gong Jun’s waist the whole time. Gong Jun didn’t bother paying attention to the conversation, just nodded along with Zhehan whenever it seemed like he should and focused on looking for Wang Tao. There were a few times when he thought he had spotted him, but he was always wrong.

“For about a year, right, Junjun?” Zhehan squeezed his waist.

“Right,” said Gong Jun, tuning back into the conversation.

The woman they were talking to smiled at them. “You look really happy together,” she said. “And I’m sure your parents are glad you found someone,” she added to Gong Jun and patted his arm. Gong Jun smiled politely. He wasn’t sure why a total stranger would care if his parents were happy or not, but he was used to nosy aunties saying all kinds of things to him.

“What are you telling people?” Gong Jun asked when she had left them alone.

“Just—a little story, about us,” Zhehan said. “I have to tell them something when they ask.”

That was fair. Gong Jun was happy to pretend he was dating Zhehan if it would help them maintain their cover.

Still, he started paying a bit more attention to what Zhehan was saying to the people they found themselves talking to. While they walked through the room, Zhehan fleshed out the details of their backstory. From one conversation to the next, Gong Jun learned that they had been dating for a year, but had known each other for a bit longer; that Gong Jun had kissed him first and Zhehan had been so happy that he hadn’t been able to stop smiling all week. He learned that they had just moved in together, which has been less of an adjustment than they expected. That part, at least, was true.

When they had circled the whole room twice, Zhehan steered him to an alcove at the side of the room. They stood behind a potted palm that mostly hid them from the rest of the room.

“It looks like he’s not here,” Zhehan said.

Gong Jun didn’t want to admit it, but Zhehan was right. “So this was a waste of time, then,” he said, leaning back against the wall.

“Not a complete waste of time,” Zhehan said. He took a step closer. “I had fun, at least.” He reached out and brushed a piece of hair off Gong Jun’s forehead.

Gong Jun tried to step back before he realized there was nowhere to go. “Zhehan.”

“Gong Jun.” Zhehan smiled and took another step closer. Gong Jun could count his eyelashes now if he wanted to. “Did you like the stories I told? You seemed like you did.”

“I—”

Zhehan placed his hand on Gong jun’s chest and slid it up to his shoulder. Gong Jun forgot how to speak. Zhehan was going to kiss him. He knew Zhehan was going to kiss him. He wasn’t supposed to kiss Zhehan, because Zhehan was leaving.

“Excuse me?”

Gong Jun jolted and shoved Zhehan away from him. There was a man standing in front of them holding a glass of wine in one hand.

“I was just going to ask if you minded finding another, ah,” the man swept his gaze over the alcove, “little hideaway. This one belongs to me.”

“Are you Wang Tao?” Gong Jun heard Zhehan ask.

Gong Jun stopped pretending to adjust his clothes.

“And who are you?” Wang Tao raised one elegant eyebrow.

“We’re friends with Liu Yichen,” Zhehan said. “We were hoping you could tell us where he is.”

Wang Tao raised his eyebrow impossibly higher. “Liu Yichen? He told me he was going to Chengdu again.”

“No,” Gong Jun said, “that can’t be right. And wait, what do you mean again? He never goes home anymore.”

Wang Tao swirled his wine around in his glass. “You can’t be very good friends with him if you think that. He spends half his time in Chengdu. It’s impossible to see him.” He took a sip of his wine. “Although he had been spending more time in Shanghai lately, moping around after the breakup.”

“The what?”

“You really must not be friends with him if you don’t even know that.” Wang Tao was frowning at them.

“I am friends with him,” Gong Jun said. “We grew up together but we’ve lost touch recently. I was trying to meet up with him again.”

“Hmm.” Wang Tao looked like he wasn’t sure whether to believe them, but something about Gong Jun’s expression seemed to have decided him. “I never met his boyfriend, but the breakup clearly wasn’t mutual. He was quite devastated.”

Gong Jun thought of the way Yichen had looked the day he’d asked Gong Jun to cat-sit. He had thought it was just overwork.

“Did he say why they broke up?” Zhehan asked.

Wang Tao shrugged. “He said something about long distance but it didn’t sound like that was the real problem. I thought that was why he kept going back to Chengdu, to visit, since he stopped going afterwards. But then he left again, so maybe they made up.”

Gong Jun and Zhehan exchanged glances.

“Is there anything else? Or can I have my little corner back now?”

“Thank you for all your help,” Zhehan said politely.

“Not at all.” Wang Tao inclined his head at them. “The rooms here are very nice if you need one, by the way,” he added.

Zhehan’s ears went pink. He grabbed Gong Jun by the elbow and steered him away from the alcove. “What do you think?” he whispered when they were out of earshot.

“If Yichen is really going to Chengdu, then whatever he’s using to travel between worlds might be there.”

“He could have been lying about where he was going.”

Gong Jun pulled his elbow out of Zhehan’s hold and straightened his jacket. “And even if he did go to Chengdu, we don’t exactly know where.”

“We’re still a bit better off than before,” Zhehan said thoughtfully. “Maybe we should think about making a little trip anyway.”

They had reached the door that the catering staff were using. Gong Jun held it open for Zhehan and followed him into the empty hallway. “Let me figure something out. If we stay in town, we can avoid my family,” he said.

Zhehan didn’t say anything. When Gong Jun looked at him, he was frowning at the floor. “Why do you want us to avoid your family?” he asked, just when Gong Jun was about to ask what was wrong.

“It’ll just be easier if we’re going to be investigating. Otherwise we’ll spend half our time trying to get away from them.”

“Oh.” Zhehan’s expression cleared up. “That makes sense.”

Gong Jun made sure to maintain a distance between them as they walked through the staff hallways of the hotel to the back door. If Zhehan noticed, he didn’t say anything.

He didn’t say anything while they took a taxi home, either, although Gong Jun could see him glancing in his direction more than once. Gong Jun thought he would say something when they got home, but Zhehan just followed him into the house and up the stairs. He let Gong Jun use the bathroom first and still didn’t say anything when Gong Jun emerged, freshly showered.

Gong Jun sat in bed and listened to the sounds of Zhehan moving around the bathroom. He had had plenty of time since the party to remind himself why kissing Zhehan would be a bad idea. He had thought Zhehan had wanted to kiss him, but he wasn't sure anymore. He could have imagined it, read too much into the way Zhehan touched him.

He hugged his knees and remembered the way Zhehan’s hand had slid up his chest. He imagined what would have happened if Zhehan had meant to kiss him, if Wang Tao hadn’t interrupted them. Maybe Zhehan would have slid his other hand up into Gong Jun’s hair, maybe he would have tilted Gong Jun’s head just right, so he could kiss him the way he wanted. Maybe his hands would have travelled elsewhere, untucking Gong Jun’s shirt, undoing his belt. Gong Jun shivered. It was better not to imagine. If Zhehan had really wanted to kiss him, he would have tried again.

He heard a yelp from the bathroom.

“What’s wrong?” he called out, already halfway to the bathroom door.

The door opened. Zhehan had taken his jacket off but was otherwise still dressed. One of the crowns in his hair had been pulled down from its original position, creating a tangle of hair by Zhehan’s ear.

“I can’t figure out how to get them out,” Zhehan said.

“Let me help.”

Gong Jun followed Zhehan in and shut the door behind them. Zhehan stood facing the mirror so Gong Jun could stand behind him and examine his hair. Once he figured out that the crowns could be prised open, it was easy to start removing them.

Zhehan was quiet while he worked. The only sound in the room was their breathing and the clink when he put another hair crown down on the counter. Little patches of pink bloomed on Zhehan’s skin wherever Gong Jun’s hands brushed against his ears and the side of his neck.

When all the crowns were out, he used his fingers to comb out the tangles in Zhehan’s hair until he could run his hands through it freely.

“There you go,” he said, voice low. When he looked up at the mirror, Zhehan was looking back at him. His eyes were dark. He was going to say something, Gong Jun knew it.

Gong Jun dropped his hands and stepped back. “Goodnight,” he said before Zhehan could even open his mouth.

He opened the bathroom door and made his escape.

When Gong Jun opened his eyes in the morning, Zhehan was curled around him just like the day before. He lay there for a moment, savouring the feeling of warmth. It was strange to think this was something he wasn’t used to just a few weeks ago.

He carefully unhooked his ankle from Zhehan’s and turned over very, very slowly until he was facing him. It wouldn’t hurt just to look. Gong Jun liked it when Zhehan was smiling, or when his mouth twisted in a pout, but he liked Zhehan’s face like this too, peaceful. He traced a finger over Zhehan’s eyebrows, his lashes, along his jaw. When he looked up again, Zhehan’s eyes were open.

“Hi,” Gong Jun said, a little breathlessly. He hadn’t meant to get caught, or maybe he had.

“Hi,” Zhehan said back. “I moved in my sleep.” There was the hint of a smile on his face.

“Yeah.” Gong Jun noticed Zhehan’s arm stayed curled around his waist.

“You said I didn’t do that anymore. Not after the first time.”

Gong Jun had said that. “I did.”

“Why?” Zhehan’s eyes stayed on his. It made Gong Jun nervous. The kind of nervous you felt when the rollercoaster got to the top of the first peak, right before you dropped.

When Gong Jun didn’t answer, Zhehan spoke again, voice gentle. “Did you know it’s a hard habit to break, waking up early? I used to get up early every morning, back home. That’s why I kept waking you up by accident when I opened my curtains.” Gong Jun’s heart started beating faster. “I was awake, yesterday, when you touched my hair.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Zhehan was still watching him. He was still smiling, but there was something uncertain in his eyes. It had cost him something to ask, Gong Jun realized, but he had asked anyway. It was unfair for Zhehan to pay the price for Gong Jun’s cowardice.

“If I’d told you,” Gong Jun said, trying to pick exactly the right words, “then you might have stopped.”

Zhehan exhaled. He leaned his head in slowly, watching to see what Gong Jun would do. When Gong Jun stayed exactly where he was, Zhehan leaned in further, until he was close enough to press his lips against Gong Jun’s gently.

After a too-short moment, Zhehan pulled back and scanned his face anxiously.

Gong Jun kissed him back. It wasn’t right that Zhehan should look so worried. He kissed Zhehan like he might not get another chance, like this was the last time they would ever see each other. He pulled Zhehan so close that it felt like there was hardly any part of their bodies that wasn’t touching. Zhehan’s hand slid up Gong Jun’s back, his hand clutching the fabric of Gong Jun’s t-shirt.

Time was a funny thing. Gong Jun knew when Zhehan surged up and pushed him down into the mattress. He knew when Zhehan’s hand came up to cradle his face and his thigh pressed between Gong Jun’s own. But he wasn’t sure when his own hands had slid down Zhehan’s back and under his waistband to knead softly, or when he had turned his head so Zhehan could suck a mark right where his neck met his shoulder. His awareness had narrowed to the feeling of Zhehan’s hands on his skin, Zhehan’s hair brushing against him while he trailed kisses up Gong Jun’s neck. When Zhehan reached into his pants and pulled out his cock, Gong Jun only knew he had gasped because Zhehan kissed the sound out of his mouth.

At some point Zhehan tugged him back onto his side, at some point he wrapped his hand around both of them, at some point Gong Jun tucked his face against Zhehan’s neck and shuddered and shuddered and shuddered while Zhehan stroked them both.

Afterwards, he lay there, sticky and warm and content. He was vaguely aware that the stickiness would get uncomfortable soon, that he should get up and take a shower, but it didn’t seem important when his face was still tucked against Zhehan’s neck and Zhehan was tracing patterns against his side with one finger.

The trilling of his alarm broke the sleepy silence. He groaned and buried his face against Zhehan’s neck. Zhehan snapped his fingers and the alarm stopped.

Gong Jun pulled away and looked at him, astonished. “You can do that?”

“Yes, but I’m not teaching you. You’ll develop bad habits.”

Gong Jun laughed and settled back down, pulling Zhehan close again.

“Why do you have to work Saturday mornings?” Gong Jun could hear the smile in his voice.

Work meant getting out of bed, it meant Zhehan would stop playing with the hair at the base of his neck, but it also meant that maybe Gong Jun could hold his hand while they walked to the shop together.

“Come on,” he said and sat up. “Let’s get clean.”

Gong Jun spent the morning touching Zhehan as much as he could get away with. Now that he was allowed, he couldn’t seem to stop. He washed Zhehan’s hair for him in the shower, and distracted him with kisses when he tried to wash Gong Jun’s in return. When he watched Zhehan in the mirror while he dried his hair for him, Zhehan looked so happy he was glowing with it. Gong Jun wondered if Zhehan could see how happy he was, too.

He held Zhehan’s hand while they walked to the shop, and while he unlocked the door, and, when Gong Jun realized they had gotten there so early that Qiaoqiao wasn’t there yet, he held Zhehan’s hand and pulled him into the backroom so he could press him up against the wall and kiss him some more. When Gong Jun finally settled in his usual spot behind the counter, Zhehan moved his own stool as close as he could and sat next to him.

Gong Jun heroically focused on his laptop for an entire five minutes before he hooked his chin over Zhehan’s shoulder. “What are you working on?” he asked.

Zhehan had the luck charms from the Lius’ shop spread out on the counter. Gong Jun watched as Zhehan cut one open and tipped over one of the halves so the powder inside spilled onto a piece of paper. Gong Jun hadn’t looked at them very closely last time. This time he was close enough that he could catch the scent Zhehan had been talking about.

“I know this smell,” Zhehan said. He poked at the powder with a pen. It was a pastel pink colour that reminded Gong Jun of the roses that grew in his family’s yard. Zhehan leaned back against Gong Jun’s shoulder. “I know that I know what this is, but I just can’t remember.”

“I know it too,” Gong Jun said, frowning. It wasn’t as familiar to him as it seemed to be to Zhehan, but he knew he had smelled it recently. “It’s not a powder usually, I think,” Zhehan said. “At least not when I’ve seen it. I just don’t know what it is.”

“Does it come in a tin?” Gong Jun asked. He had seen a tin that was this exact shade of pink recently, too, although he couldn’t remember where. He closed his eyes and tried to think.

“Yes? Maybe? Wait, yes it does.” Zhehan said. “It’s pink too. There’s a picture of a woman on the side.”

Gong Jun opened his eyes. “Candy Courage,” he said.

“Yes! Wait, how do you know what that is?”

“There was a tin of it in Yichen’s workshop. It was empty so I threw it away.” Gong Jun stared at Zhehan. “I’d never heard of it before. It’s from your world, isn’t it?”

“You said Professor Li was the only other person selling luck charms before this, right?” Zhehan asked. He picked up one of the charms and turned it over in his hand. “This stuff isn’t that effective. Otherwise everyone would be addicted to getting a little confidence boost whenever they felt like it.” He looked at Gong Jun again. “But if the Lius have done something to enhance its powers…a bit of confidence feels a lot like luck.”

“So luck charms aren’t real?”

“The Lius’ charms aren’t real, but Professor Li’s are.” Zhehan put the charm down and reached under the counter to pull out one of Professor Li’s notebooks. “I wasn’t sure at first, but after I looked through more, I realized I was right.” He opened the notebook to a page that was covered in diagrams of overlapping circles. “Does this look familiar to you?”

“Is it supposed to?”

Zhehan laughed. “I guess my notes really were confusing. Do you remember the note I left you that first day, when I tried to explain how multiple worlds work?”

“Your writing is hard to read,” Gong Jun protested.

“Uh huh.” Zhehan smiled. “Well, if you had been paying attention like a good student, you’d notice some of the diagrams I drew look a bit like these.” He flipped forward a few more pages. “There’s more in here. She has pages and pages of notes and calculations. It’s not quite right, but she was getting close.”

“So Professor Li had figured out there were multiple worlds,” Gong Jun said slowly. “But what does that have to do with luck charms?”

“Manipulating someone’s luck gets messy,” Zhehan explained. “If you change a person’s luck enough, you could alter their fate. For most people, that doesn’t matter, but what if you alter the fate of someone who’s supposed to lead a country, or end a war?”

Gong Jun remembered how Zhehan had explained multiple worlds. “You said worlds split off from each other to account for more than one outcome for the same event. So in one world, they’d end a war and in one they wouldn’t?”

“Right,” Zhehan said. “Professor Li must have wanted to know what the consequences of her luck charms were. That’s how she stumbled upon the existence of multiple worlds.”

Gong Jun felt the pieces forming a picture in his mind, and he didn’t like what he saw. “The Lius realized she had figured it out. If they’ve been bringing in things from other worlds to sell, they wouldn’t want anyone else to find out. They had to stop her.”

“How does outselling her achieve that?” Zhehan asked.

“It’s not just that,” Gong Jun said. “Yichen told me, the day he asked me to cat-sit for him, that Professor Li lost all her research funding because of them. She left the university and the only money she had coming in was from the shop. She’d never focused on it much before, that’s why it was so disorganized, but her spells are so good, people came to her anyway.” He tapped his pen against the counter. “But then the Lius opened down the street and people stopped coming.”

“So they thought if she had no money, she would have to stop?” Zhehan frowned. “It’s a weird plan, isn’t it? Why not just, you know,” Zhehan made a throat cutting motion.

“You think they’d do that?” Gong Jun asked, taken aback. He had known the Lius his entire life. He used to spend long afternoons playing with Yichen and his cousins. He forced himself to consider the possibility they could have had Professor Li killed.

“You know them better than me,” Zhehan said. “And if they came up with this complicated plan instead, they clearly didn’t think killing her was the best option.”

Gong Jun wasn’t sure he knew the Lius very well anymore.

Zhehan picked up the luck charm again. “They must have more tins of this stuff, right? If they’re putting it in products they’re selling.”

“We should plan to go to Chengdu soon, then,” Gong Jun said. “They have a warehouse there. If they do have more, that’s where they’ll be keeping it.”

The bell over the door rang. Qiaoqiao walked straight up to the front counter and propped her elbows on it so she could rest her chin on her hands. “Good morning,” she said with a big smile.

“What are you so happy about?” Gong Jun asked suspiciously. It couldn’t be a good sign if Qiaoqiao was this happy.

“Do you want to know why I’m late?” she asked.

Gong Jun checked the time. “Yes. You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

“Weird that you didn’t notice until just now though,” Qiaoqiao said, still with that big smile. “So strange. But I guess it’s hard to pay attention to little details like the time when you’re so happy.”

Gong Jun scooted a little away from Zhehan. “What are you talking about?”

Qiaoqiao looked back and forth at the two of them. “I got a very interesting message this morning. One of my friends asked me if the handsome cousin who works with me was dating someone.”

Gong Jun saw Zhehan start to blush out of the corner of his eye.

“Of course, I said I had no idea what she was talking about. Maybe she was getting me confused with someone else. After all, my cousin is a coward.” Qiaoqiao was enjoying herself so much. Gong Jun was going to kill her. “But then she sent me a little video.” Qiaoqiao put her phone on the counter. It was already open to the video. She pressed play.

“That’s not fair,” Zhehan said after watching a few seconds. “We didn’t even actually kiss then.”

Qiaoqiao drummed her fingers on the counter. “Oh, I’m so sorry. My sources were unreliable. But there was a real kiss, then?” When neither of them answered, she continued. “Because I also have a very romantic tale to tell you about how you’ve been dating for two years and Jun-ge proposed last month, and you’ve moved in together already because the wedding is next month.”

Zhehan made a sound somewhere between a squeak and a yelp.

“Who told you that?” Gong Jun asked quickly. If Qiaoqiao knew, then it was only a matter of time before other people knew.

“I got it from my friend whose roommate’s sister’s cousin works at the hotel you went to last night. But I have worse news for you.” She waved her phone in the air. “My mom just messaged me to ask if you were engaged because she heard it from her friend whose hairdresser is sisters with someone who was at the party last night and also apparently knows your parents.”

Gong Jun’s brain stopped trying to make sense of the swirling mess of sisters and cousins and hairdressers to settle on one thing. Someone, at some point today, was going to tell his parents he was engaged. Or married. Or worse.

His phone started to ring on the counter. He looked at the caller ID. It was his mom.

Gong Jun put their bags in the overhead compartment and snapped it shut. The train car they were in wasn’t too crowded, probably because most people had the good sense to book a sleeper car for the overnight journey.

“Are you sure this is okay?” he asked Zhehan for what was at least the fifth time, even though it was definitely too late for them to change their minds. Zhehan just scrunched up his nose and smiled at him, patting the seat next to him.

“Are you nervous?” he asked when Gong Jun had settled in his seat and Zhehan had spread the blanket Gong Jun had insisted on bringing over both their laps.

“What’s there to be nervous about?” Gong Jun said. Except that he was bringing his someone home to see his parents. Except that even after he’d assured his mom that he hadn’t gotten engaged or married without telling her, they thought he’d been with Zhehan for long enough that he had decided to secretly stay with him while he was in Shanghai. Except that there was no doubt that every single aunt and cousin he had would want a look at Zhehan. Except that they somehow had to sneak away from all of them long enough to figure out how the Lius were bringing in things from Zhehan’s world.

Zhehan squeezed his hand. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

Gong Jun had absolutely no reason to believe it would be except that Zhehan had said so, but that was enough for some of the tension to drain out of his shoulders.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” he asked. They had snacked their way through an afternoon of frantic packing and last-minute arrangements, including convincing Cat that Qiaoqiao would be able to take care of her just as well as Gong Jun, but they hadn’t had a proper meal since breakfast.

“Maybe a little bit later?” Zhehan covered a yawn with his hand. “I just want to close my eyes for a bit.” He poked Gong Jun in the side. “Someone didn’t let me sleep in today.”

Gong Jun bit back a smile and pulled the blanket around their shoulders. “You want me to wake you up in a few hours for dinner?”

“Maybe I’ll wake you up in a few hours,” Zhehan said, leaning his head against Gong Jun’s shoulder. He already sounded half-asleep. Just when he thought Zhehan had finally dozed off, Gong Jun heard his voice again, small and sleepy.

“I’m glad.”

“Hmm?”

“I thought maybe I got it wrong, about you I mean,” Zhehan said. “I’m glad I didn’t.”

Gong Jun didn’t bother trying to hide his smile this time. He found Zhehan’s hand under the blanket and laced their fingers together. Zhehan responded by tucking himself even closer against Gong Jun’s side. Gong brushed his thumb over Zhehan’s gently until he heard his breath settle into the slow rhythm of sleep.

Gong Jun looked over the top of Zhehan’s head out the window. It felt like the train had only just pulled out of the station, but they had already left the city far behind to puff their way through the countryside. The sun was starting to set, painting the sky in rich pinks and oranges.

There was the soft sound of something dropping against the carpeted floor of the train. Gong Jun looked away from the window. A row ahead of them, on the opposite side of the aisle, there was a family with a small child. Gong Jun watched as a woman reached down and picked up a stuffed rabbit from the floor before giving it back to her daughter. The girl grabbed it and hugged it close. Gong Jun kept watching as the woman turned to her wife and pressed a kiss to her hair.

Next to him, he felt Zhehan move. Gong Jun looked down, but he was still asleep, the side of his face pressed a little tighter against Gong Jun’s shoulder. An image came into his mind unbidden, of him and Zhehan on another train journey. Gong Jun and Zhehan, travelling to visit his family again, but this time there was a little girl sitting across from Gong Jun, swinging her legs and holding a stuffed cat. Gong Jun and Zhehan, except there was a baby in Zhehan’s arms that was gurgling with laughter while Zhehan made cooing noises. Gong Jun already knew Zhehan liked kids. His eyes lit up whenever a customer with a child came into the store. And now that he was Zhehan’s—now that Zhehan was—

Gong Jun looked at Zhehan and tried to swallow down the sudden ache in his chest. They’d barely known each other for a month. It would be too soon to be planning entire futures in any case, but he still didn’t know what exactly Zhehan wanted from him. Zhehan had a whole world to go back to, where he had a life and a family, and there was no reason at all to assume he’d give any of that up to stay with Gong Jun.

He swallowed hard and pressed a kiss to Zhehan’s hair, then tilted his head down to rest against Zhehan’s own. When he closed his eyes, he saw the image again. Zhehan and him, a family.

It wasn’t until the train had pulled into the station, and they’d gotten off with all their luggage, that Zhehan seemed to remember he had a reason to be nervous too.

“What if they don’t like me?” he asked Gong Jun. He was holding onto one of Gong Jun’s hands with both of his own. “I’m basically like a secret mistress from what they’ve heard. That you’ve been living with illicitly. And then we’re going to lie to them.”

“They’ll like you,” Gong Jun said. “I like you, so they’ll like you.

“Anyway, they’re more likely to be mad at me,” he added, when Zhehan didn’t look reassured. “I’m the one who apparently hid you from them.”

“What if they think that was my evil influence?” Zhehan asked gloomily.

Gong Jun pulled his hand free and wrapped his arms around Zhehan’s shoulders. “That’s a good point,” he said seriously. “They might see you smile at me and wonder if I’m under a spell.”

Zhehan made a face and leaned into his side. “You really think they’ll like me?”

Gong Jun laughed. “They will,” he promised.

It didn’t take long after meeting his parents for Gong Jun to prove he was right. His mother reserved all her scolding for Gong Jun, asking him how he could have kept such a secret from them. For Zhehan, she had nothing but smiles.

His father was quieter, but he was clearly pleased too, listening to Zhehan tell them about himself as honestly as he could without revealing the whole truth.

When Gong Jun was halfway through cooking dinner, his mother came to find him in the kitchen. “We have to meet his parents before you can get married,” she said.

Gong Jun dropped his fish into the pan mid-flip. He whirled around to look at his mother. “I told you all of that stuff was made up. The proposal, the engagement, all of it.”

“He’s serious about you,” she said. “I can tell.”

Gong Jun turned back to the stove to stare at his fish sizzling in the pan. If he couldn’t tell how serious Zhehan was about him, he didn’t think anyone else could either. “We haven’t known each other that long. He might change his mind.”

His mother snorted. “He’s sitting in the other room with your father cooing over every childhood photo of you that exists. He’s not changing his mind.”

“He’s very polite.” Gong Jun looked over his shoulder in time to see his mother roll her eyes.

“If you don’t marry him, the next one has to be three times as good,” she told him and left the kitchen.

Gong Jun snuck glances at Zhehan while they ate dinner, trying to see what his mother saw. Zhehan smiled and laughed as he always did. His nervousness had worn off as soon as he had walked in, and Gong Jun’s mother had asked him if he was sure he wanted to put up with someone as finicky as her son.

Gong Jun put a piece of fish in Zhehan’s bowl. Zhehan shot him a smile and pressed his knee against Gong Jun’s under the table.

After dinner, they had to wait for Gong Jun’s parents to go to bed before they could sneak out. Zhehan was better at that than Gong Jun, who jittered his leg impatiently while his parents told endless stories about him.

When it was finally late enough that his mother couldn’t make excuses to keep talking with Zhehan any longer, his parents went to bed and he and Zhehan escaped to Gong Jun’s room.

“Wear this,” Gong Jun said, tossing Zhehan a dark shirt from his dresser. “There aren’t many lights near the Lius’ warehouse, so we should be okay as long as we blend in.”

Zhehan caught the shirt and put it on the bed while he pulled off the one he was wearing. Gong Jun spared a moment to admire the cut of his waist. “You were right,” Zhehan said, pulling the new shirt on. “I don’t think your parents hate me.”

“They love you,” Gong Jun said, changing his own shirt. He didn’t mention what his mother had said about marriage. It would only make things awkward and they didn’t have time for that. “I didn’t think they’d ever stop telling you stories about me.”

“I liked the one about the disappearing math test,” Zhehan said, grinning. “That really was you, right?”

“It must have been,” Gong Jun admitted. The school had found the missing test papers in a field nearby, running away on the spindly root legs they had sprouted. He grabbed the glow charms they’d packed. “Let’s go, before either of them wake up and remember something else they want to tell you.”

Zhehan followed him out of his room and down the stairs. Gong Jun showed him how to avoid the parts of the floor that creaked.

Once they made it out the front gate, Gong Jun relaxed. The next part was easy. He unlocked his mother’s car and got in the driver’s seat. Zhehan slipped into the passenger’s seat next to him.

Gong Jun put the key in the ignition and then stopped before turning it. “Can you do something so no one will hear us? It’s noisy when it starts.”

Zhehan nodded and snapped his fingers.

Gong Jun looked around. Nothing had changed. “What did you do?”

“A spell to keep sound from getting out,” Zhehan said. “No one can hear us unless they’re inside the boundary.”

Gong Jun turned the key and heard the car start up. He looked at Zhehan again.

“We can hear it because we’re inside it,” Zhehan assured him. “No one else can.”

Gong Jun nodded and put the car in drive.

They drove slowly down the street. Gong Jun kept the lights off until they had made it well past the last house. “It’s not too far,” he explained to Zhehan. “Most of the magical families around here that work with plant magic have plots of land further out so they can grow what they need for their spells.”

The countryside was dark around them. There were no streetlights on the roads here, the car lights the only thing illuminating the road ahead. After fifteen minutes, Gong Jun’s headlights finally swept over a big No Trespassing sign at the side of the road.

Gong Jun parked next to the sign. “Come on,” he said. “It’s past the trees here.”

It didn’t take long to make their way through the copse of trees and out onto the Lius’ fields. The warehouse was close by on their right.

“How are we going to get inside?” Zhehan asked.

“There’s windows on the other side,” Gong Jun whispered back. “We can look through them and see what’s inside.” He had meant to use the train journey to make a better plan, but dozing the time away with Zhehan on his shoulder had been so much more pleasant.

They crept around the warehouse, keeping close to the walls. When they reached the side with windows, Gong Jun pulled one of the glow charms out of his pocket and activated it.

He held it up near the glass and moved it around to illuminate the warehouse. It was full of shelves, neatly filled with boxes and tins. Gong Jun squinted, trying to identify any of them.

“I know that one,” Zhehan said, pointing at one of the boxes closest to the window. “That’s dragon scales from world 5A.” He pointed to another box. “That one’s polar violets from world 6D, they’re used to detect lies.” Gong Jun moved the glow charm higher, trying to see further into the warehouse. Zhehan put his hand on the window, leaning closer.

An alarm started blaring.

“What is that?” Zhehan dropped his hand and looked around frantically. The alarm kept going.

“We need to go,” Gong Jun said. He tore up the glow charm and grabbed Zhehan’s hand. He could already hear shouts coming from the other side of the warehouse. They couldn’t leave the way they had come.

Behind them was a thick forest. He started running towards it, pulling Zhehan with him. Don’t notice us, he thought as they ran. Don’t notice us, don’t notice us, don’t notice us.

A man came running around the warehouse towards them, but his eyes skipped right over them. Gong Jun kept running. He didn’t stop until they had reached the safety of the trees. Zhehan was breathing hard behind him.

“Are you ok?” Gong Jun whispered. “Your knee—”

Zhehan waved him off. “It’s fine,” he said, at a normal volume. “You don’t have to whisper. I put another soundproofing spell on us while we were running.”

Gong Jun peered through the trees at the warehouse. There were people around, with lights bobbing in the air, still searching for them. “We can’t leave until they’re gone.”

Zhehan nodded. He took out another glow charm and lit it, looking around. “What is this place?”

“It’s the forest the Lius have on their land,” Gong Jun said. He looked at the glow charm Zhehan was holding and wondered if the trees were enough to hide it from the people looking for them. “We used to play here when I was small, but there was an earthquake that damaged a lot of the trees and we weren’t allowed anymore after that.”

“There’s something wrong here,” Zhehan said.

“What do you mean?” Gong Jun glanced at the forest where Zhehan was aiming his glow charm. It looked like an ordinary forest to him.

“There’s magic here. A lot of it,” Zhehan said. “You said there was an earthquake?”

Gong Jun nodded. “A big one.”

“Sometimes earthquakes can shake things loose, or make magics collide with each other in strange ways,” Zhehan said. “If the Lius have a way to travel to other worlds, it might be here.”

Gong Jun stared at him. “The Lius didn’t start becoming successful until after the earthquake,” he said slowly. “That’s when Yichen’s dad took over their business. They weren’t badly off before, but afterwards their spells were stronger. More people started visiting their shop.”

“That makes sense,” Zhehan said. “They must have started smuggling things in from other worlds then.” He looked at Gong Jun and grinned. “Let’s try and find the gateway? We’re already here, and we can’t leave until people stop searching for us.”

Gong Jun nodded. He was a little nervous, but Zhehan seemed so calm, it was hard to believe anything would go wrong. “How will we know which direction to go in?”

“I can feel where the magic is thicker,” Zhehan said. “Follow me.”

They walked through the forest slowly, Zhehan’s glow charm held aloft to light up the ground ahead of them. Zhehan stopped every once in a while to test whether they were going the right direction.

“How did you know how to do that, by the way?” he asked after they had been walking in silence for a while.

“Do what?”

“Make those people not notice us.”

Gong Jun shrugged. “I wasn’t sure if I could make people not see me, so I thought it would be easier to just make them not care very much about what they were seeing.”

“I think my old teacher would like to meet you,” Zhehan said. “You—” he paused and looked at Gong Jun thoughtfully. “There are some things you do instinctively that take people years to learn, but there are other things that are simple for most people but difficult for you.” He smiled. “I don’t know if he’ll agree to teach anyone new, but it’s worth a shot.”

Gong Jun grabbed Zhehan’s hand and pulled him to a stop. “What does that mean?” Gong Jun asked.

“What?” Zhehan looked puzzled. “You need a teacher and I said I’d help you find one. It can’t be me, at least not for everything. We can still do lessons together, too.”

Gong Jun swallowed hard. His throat felt dry. “You mean—I’ll come to your world?”

“Yeah,” Zhehan smiled. “You can meet Lufei too, and my mom. My apartment isn’t as big as that house but it’s definitely big enough for the two of us.”

“You want me to stay with you?”

“Oh.” The light from the glow charm was enough for Gong Jun to see how Zhehan’s whole face started to turn pink. “Sorry—I mean—if you want your own space that makes sense too—I just didn’t think—but you’re right, you probably need your own place, right? I can help you find one—Or if you want to stay in your world, you can just visit sometimes. And you can still meet Lufei and everything…”

Zhehan’s voice trailed off. His left hand was twisted in the hem of his shirt. Gong Jun reached out to take it and pull Zhehan closer, until he was standing right in front of him.

“Are you sure you want me to live with you?” Gong Jun asked. It wasn’t exactly the right question but it would have to do.

“Of course I do,” Zhehan said immediately. “But you don’t have to if you don’t want to, we haven’t known each other for very long and if—”

“I want to,” Gong Jun said.

“Oh.” Zhehan’s face broke into a wide smile. Gong Jun’s heart thumped.

“I can’t leave my family,” Gong Jun added.

“We can figure it out,” Zhehan said. “Maybe we can do six months here and six months there. Although you have a lot of catching up to do, so we might have to spend longer in my world at first while you’re learning.”

Gong Jun looked at Zhehan’s hand in his. Zhehan’s fingers were a little stockier than his. He traced the calluses on his palms.

“Junjun?” Zhehan squeezed his hand. “What is it?”

“I didn’t know,” Gong Jun said. “I wasn’t sure what you wanted. I thought you might go back to your own world without me, once we found out how to get you there.”

“I wouldn’t,” Zhehan said fiercely, holding his hand tighter. “I like you too much.” He flushed when he realized what he’d said.

Gong Jun pulled him closer, and when that wasn’t close enough he let go of Zhehan’s hand so he could wrap his arms around Zhehan’s shoulders. Zhehan’s arms snaked around his waist.

“You’re stuck with me,” Zhehan said against his shoulder.

“I’ll manage somehow,” Gong Jun said. He knew Zhehan could hear the happiness in his voice.

“Ow!”

Gong Jun pulled back enough for him and Zhehan to exchange a look. Zhehan held his glow charm up. The voice had come from a little ways ahead of them.

“Why didn’t you tell me we’d be landing in the middle of a forest?” The voice said.

Zhehan grinned. “I know that voice.” He snapped his fingers. “Xiaoyu!” he called out, walking forwards.

“Zhehan?” the voice said.

Zhehan walked faster, Gong Jun following behind him. The trees gave way to a clearing, lit by moonlight. There was a man sitting in the middle of it, looking disgruntled. Yichen was standing next to him with another man.

Zhehan walked up to the man who was sitting and pulled him to his feet. “How did you find me? And who are these two?”

“That’s Yichen,” Gong Jun said, nodding at him. “I’m guessing this is his boyfriend.” He took some more glow charms out of his pocket and activated them, handing them out.

“Ex-boyfriend,” the man said crisply, taking a glow charm from Gong Jun.

“Chen Bo,” Yichen said, “I—”

“No.”

Yichen looked at the ground and swallowed.

The man Zhehan had called Xiaoyu brushed some dirt off his pants. “Thanks,” he said to Zhehan. “That one didn’t tell me where we were going exactly,” he pointed his chin at Yichen, “and I tripped over a tree stump as soon as I landed.”

“I told you it was on my family’s land,” Yichen said defensively.

“Land comes in many forms,” Xiaoyu said dryly. He turned to Zhehan. “Did you know, by the way? The house you were renting collapsed.”

Zhehan blinked. “Oh.” He looked at Gong Jun. “That would explain why the connection was broken.” Gong Jun thought Zhehan seemed much too calm about an entire house having collapsed. He turned back to Xiaoyu, “The house was connected to—”

“No need,” Xiaoyu said. “I already heard the whole story from these two.” He glanced at Yichen and Chen Bo. “They thought they could make two houses exist on top of each other in two different worlds.”

“I want to hear more about that,” Zhehan said, rounding on them. “I’ve been thinking of how to fix it and I—”

“Over there!” A shout came from beyond the clearing. Gong Jun heard what sounded like at least a dozen people running towards them.

“Shit,” Yichen said, eyes widening. “Run! They can’t catch us!” He grabbed Chen Bo’s hand and bolted out of the clearing in the opposite direction of the voices, pulling Chen Bo along.

Xiaoyu sighed. “He’s so excitable.” He started running after them, Gong Jun and Zhehan following behind him.

“Gong Jun, use the spell you did before when we were running away,” Zhehan said quickly. “But use it on all of us.”

Gong Jun thought don’t notice us as intently as he could.

“They’re up ahead,” a voice called out behind them.

Gong Jun ran faster. “I don’t think I can run and use magic at the same time.”

Zhehan laughed.

Gong Jun glanced at him, amazed. “Are you laughing? In this situation?”

Zhehan grinned at him. “Isn’t this fun?” He grabbed Gong Jun’s hand. “Xiaoyu,” he yelled. “Grab those two and get up above the trees. We have a car nearby. You’ll see it.”

Xiaoyu waved his hand in acknowledgement and sped up to catch up to Yichen and Chen Bo.

“Don’t let go of my hand,” Zhehan said to Gong Jun, and in the next moment Gong Jun felt his feet leave the ground. Zhehan rose up through the air, Gong Jun rising with him. They floated up until they were above the forest. Zhehan turned midair until he spotted their car and then started running towards it, feet pressing against the air.

Gong Jun glanced back and saw Xiaoyu wasn’t far behind, holding onto Yichen and Chen Bo with either hand.

Unfortunately, the Lius had no trouble levitating either. Wind whipped the ground under them, rising up in columns to hold them aloft. Yichen’s dad wasn’t one of them, though Gong Jun spotted a few of Yichen’s cousins.

Zhehan moved faster through the air, speeding them over the warehouse and the trees to land beside the car.

Gong Jun unlocked it hurriedly and turned the key in the ignition, Zhehan getting in beside him. Xiaoyu tumbled to the ground with Yichen and Chen Bo in tow. When they were all in the car, Gong Jun slammed his foot on the accelerator. They shot off down the road.

“Shouldn’t we be going in the opposite direction?” Zhehan asked.

“There’s no time to turn around,” Gong Jun said, looking in his rearview mirror. He couldn’t see anyone behind them but that didn’t mean anything. They were probably following them in the air. He willed the car to go faster.

“Who are you, by the way?” Xiaoyu was looking at him in the mirror.

“He’s the friend who was looking after my house,” Yichen said, at the same time Zhehan glanced back at Xiaoyu and said, “He’s my boyfriend.”

Xiaoyu raised his eyebrows at Zhehan and looked at Gong Jun again. “Okay, then. We can talk more when we’re not being chased by hooligans.”

“They’re not hooligans, they’re my family,” Yichen protested. He paused. “They’re hooligans sometimes.”

Chen Bo snorted. He was wedged at the side and looking resolutely away from Yichen, who was crammed in the middle seat next to him.

“This is why I didn’t want you to come live here,” Yichen said, pleading. “I’m sorry I didn’t explain properly, but I said I’d move to be with you, didn’t I? And I did!”

“What?” Gong Jun looked up at the mirror again. “What does that mean? You weren’t planning on coming back?”

“I—”

“You left Cat! You were going to abandon her?”

“It’s not abandonment,” Yichen said, leaning towards Gong Jun between the seats. “You were taking care of her!”

“So when you said you wanted me to cat-sit, you were actually giving me your cat.” Gong Jun pressed down on the accelerator harder. “You said it was a simple favour.”

“It is! Isn’t she easy to take care of?”

Gong Jun pressed his mouth into a thin line. He saw Zhehan look at him from the corner of his eye and then glance back at Yichen.

“We’re keeping Cat,” Zhehan said. “Since you don’t want her.”

Something hit the roof of the car. Then another something, then another. Gong Jun looked into the rearview mirror to see Xiaoyu glancing up serenely. He wondered if all of Zhehan’s friends were as calm as he was. He turned his attention back to the road, watching as a small rock bounced off the car hood. “They’re pelting us with rocks,” he said. Maybe the calmness was catching. A rock dropped from high enough would seriously damage his mother’s car. She was going to have another reason to hate the Lius.

He spun the wheel to the right, turning onto the next street. This one curved its way back all the way to his family’s home. He pressed hard on the accelerator again. “Go faster,” he said loudly. The car sped up, far faster than it should have been able to.

“I don’t think it’s safe to drive this fast,” Yichen said from the back.

“Shut up,” Gong Jun said. Yichen stopped talking.

Gong Jun realized he couldn’t hear the rocks hitting the car anymore. He glanced at Zhehan.

“Just a small shield spell,” Zhehan said, smiling. Gong Jun smiled back.

When he pulled up to his family’s house, all the lights were on. His mother was standing at the open gate, waving them in. Gong Jun drove straight into the yard. As soon as he got out of the car, he could hear the roar of wind and the sound of people yelling. The Lius were getting closer.

“What happened?” his mother demanded. “We could hear shouting and the wind roaring for ages, and then we noticed you weren’t in your room, neither of you,” she said, looking at Zhehan.

“Why couldn’t we hear anything?” Gong Jun asked Zhehan.

“Opposite of a soundproofing spell,” Zhehan said. “Keeping the noise out instead of in.”

Gong Jun’s father was examining the car. “What happened?”

Yichen and Chen Bo had moved off to the side. Xiaoyu was leaning against the car, hands in his pockets, shifting out of the way as Gong Jun’s father walked around it.

“The Lius decided to attack us with rocks because we found their secret gateway to other worlds, which exist,” Gong Jun said. He was still feeling calm, even though he could hear the Lius coming closer, their shouts growing louder. Qiaoqiao would probably regret not being here, he thought.

His mother narrowed her eyes. “They attacked my son?” She whirled around to stand in front of the gate. The Lius were racing up the street, although their wind columns were considerably smaller now. It probably took a lot of energy to levitate for that long.

His mother raised her arms. Every vine growing along the garden wall shot up into the air, growing longer. His mother pushed her hands forward, and the vines rushed ahead, snatching up every member of the Liu family who sped towards them. When she was done, the air was filled with Lius.

She turned back to Gong Jun and Zhehan. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere. We can go inside and you can explain.” She looked at Yichen and Chen Bo and Xiaoyu. “You three too.”

Gong Jun tugged on Zhehan’s hand to hold him back while the others went inside. His father walked in last, glancing back at him before closing the door. “What were you saying earlier?” he asked. “At the clearing. About fixing the house.”

“Oh,” Zhehan grinned at him. “I think I know how to make it work. It’s the doorways. You know how things kept flickering when you opened the cupboard doors? And we could only talk to each other when you opened your shower curtain, which is just another kind of door.”

Gong Jun remembered.

“Well, I think their mistake was tying two different houses together. They just needed one house with two doors, one in each world.”

“So what does that mean?” Gong Jun asked. He didn’t care about theories of parallelity or dimensional whatever. He just wanted to know what it meant for him and Zhehan.

“We could live in your world,” Zhehan said. His smile was so bright that Gong Jun found himself smiling back even though he didn’t understand the doors thing at all. “Or you could move into my apartment, like I said. As long as we have a door for each world, we can stay wherever we like. We won’t have to travel back and forth.

“I’m still not positive it works,” he added. “I didn’t want to say before in case I was wrong, but if it does—”

Gong Jun kissed him.